Fabrication of three-dimensional suspended, interlayered and hierarchical nanostructures by accuracy-improved electron beam lithography overlay

Nanofabrication techniques are essential for exploring nanoscience and many closely related research fields such as materials, electronics, optics and photonics. Recently, three-dimensional (3D) nanofabrication techniques have been actively investigated through many different ways, however, it is still challenging to make elaborate and complex 3D nanostructures that many researchers want to realize for further interesting physics studies and device applications. Electron beam lithography, one of the two-dimensional (2D) nanofabrication techniques, is also feasible to realize elaborate 3D nanostructures by stacking each 2D nanostructures. However, alignment errors among the individual 2D nanostructures have been difficult to control due to some practical issues. In this work, we introduce a straightforward approach to drastically increase the overlay accuracy of sub-20 nm based on carefully designed alignmarks and calibrators. Three different types of 3D nanostructures whose designs are motivated from metamaterials and plasmonic structures have been demonstrated to verify the feasibility of the method, and the desired result has been achieved. We believe our work can provide a useful approach for building more advanced and complex 3D nanostructures.114sciescopu

Luminescent hyperbolic metasurfaces.

When engineered on scales much smaller than the operating wavelength, metal-semiconductor nanostructures exhibit properties unobtainable in nature. Namely, a uniaxial optical metamaterial described by a hyperbolic dispersion relation can simultaneously behave as a reflective metal and an absorptive or emissive semiconductor for electromagnetic waves with orthogonal linear polarization states. Using an unconventional multilayer architecture, we demonstrate luminescent hyperbolic metasurfaces, wherein distributed semiconducting quantum wells display extreme absorption and emission polarization anisotropy. Through normally incident micro-photoluminescence measurements, we observe absorption anisotropies greater than a factor of 10 and degree-of-linear polarization of emission >0.9. We observe the modification of emission spectra and, by incorporating wavelength-scale gratings, show a controlled reduction of polarization anisotropy. We verify hyperbolic dispersion with numerical simulations that model the metasurface as a composite nanoscale structure and according to the effective medium approximation. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate >350% emission intensity enhancement relative to the bare semiconducting quantum wells