Collaborative Research: Controlling the Chemistry at the Nanoscale: Parallelization, Robustness, and Registration

纳米制造是制造具有纳米尺度的任意图案的功能结构的过程。纳米技术在微电子设备和信息技术方面已经得到了广泛的商业应用。然而，传统光刻技术在分辨率、资金和操作成本方面的局限性，以及在可图像化和制造的材料方面有限的灵活性，促使了非常规制造方法的发展。扫描探针光刻技术是一种很有前途的新型制造方法，它利用扫描尖探针在材料表面进行纳米级的精密加工。该奖项支持基于热探针的扫描探针光刻方法的基础研究，该方法用于在纳米尺度上热化学改变材料的性质。这项技术被称为热化学纳米光刻技术，具有广泛的应用，特别是在石墨烯、导电聚合物纳米线、DNA和蛋白质纳米阵列中制造纳米结构。这项研究工作旨在回答能够促进热化学纳米光刻技术广泛应用的问题，并为学生提供独特的跨学科培训，包括发展材料科学，光谱学，纳米和微制造以及表面科学技术方面的知识。这将使该团队能够增强社区对纳米尺度工艺的理解，并有可能提供廉价而强大的工具，以降低进入纳米光刻模式的成本。热化学纳米光刻是一种基于原子力显微镜的通用技术，可以通过化学修饰石墨烯的局部热还原来制造纳米结构和纳米带。热化学纳米光刻是利用热探针局部加热材料表面，产生多种纳米尺度的化学反应，这些反应可以在空间分辨率和化学转化程度上进行控制，从而获得复杂的化学梯度。对于基于类石墨烯材料的下一代电子、传感器和能源纳米器件的应用，该项目旨在解决以下问题：(i)制造无缺陷的石墨烯纳米带，可以在任意基板上控制尺寸、长度和定位（注册表）；（ii）石墨烯和其他纳米结构材料的纳米级化学控制。研究团队将通过实验、有限元计算和密度泛函理论模拟来了解和控制石墨烯基材料的纳米级热化学改性，以制造出对定位和尺寸具有良好控制的高质量石墨烯纳米带。此外，该项目旨在利用温度控制和软件的新概念开发并行（多达100个探针）模式，目标是在1秒内写入和读取超过100万个10纳米像素。

Nanofabrication is the process of making functional structures with arbitrary patterns having nanoscale dimensions. Nanofabrication has been widely implemented commercially for improving microelectronic devices and information technology. However, the limitations of conventional lithography techniques in terms of resolution, capital and operational costs, and limited flexibility in terms of materials that can be patterned and fabricated have motivated the development of unconventional fabrication methods. Scanning probe lithography is one of these promising new fabrication methods, and it uses a scanning sharp probe to produce with nanoscale precision modifications on the surface of a material. This award supports fundamental research for the development of a scanning probe lithography method based on hot probes, which are used to thermo-chemically change the properties of a material at the nanoscale. This technology, called thermochemical nanolithography, has a broad range of applications, in particular to fabricate nanostructures in graphene, conductive polymers nanowires, DNA and protein nano-arrays. The research work is geared toward answering questions that can facilitate the wide scale use of thermochemical nanolithography and providing students with a unique interdisciplinary training that includes developing knowledge in materials science, spectroscopy, nano- and micro-fabrication, and surface science techniques. This will enable the team to augment the community's understanding of nanoscale processes and potentially provide inexpensive and robust tools to decrease the cost of entry into nanolithographic patterning. Thermochemical nanolithography is a versatile atomic force microscopy based technique that can be used to fabricate nanostructures and nanoribbons of graphene-like materials via local thermal reduction of chemically modified graphene. Thermochemical nanolithography uses thermal probes to locally heat the surface of a material to produce a variety of nano-scale chemical reactions, which can be controlled in terms of spatial resolution and extent of chemical conversion, so that complex chemical gradients can be obtained. For applications in the next generation of electronic, sensor and energy nano-devices based on graphene-like materials, this project aims to address the following issues: (i) fabrication of defect-free graphene nanoribbons with control over size, length and positioning (registry) on arbitrary substrates; and (ii) nanoscale control of the chemistry of graphene and other materials nanostructures. The research team will use experiments, finite elements calculations and density functional theory simulations for understanding and controlling the nanoscale thermo-chemical modification of graphene-based materials to fabricate graphene nanoribbons of high quality with excellent control over positioning and size. Furthermore, this project aims at developing parallel (up to 100 probes) patterning using novel concepts of temperature control and software, with the goal of writing and then reading more than 1 million 10-nm pixels in 1 second.