1 research outputs found
Rapid Focused Ion Beam Milling Based Fabrication of Plasmonic Nanoparticles and Assemblies <i>via</i> “Sketch and Peel” Strategy
Focused ion beam
(FIB) milling is a versatile maskless and resistless
patterning technique and has been widely used for the fabrication
of inverse plasmonic structures such as nanoholes and nanoslits for
various applications. However, due to its subtractive milling nature,
it is an impractical method to fabricate isolated plasmonic nanoparticles
and assemblies which are more commonly adopted in applications. In
this work, we propose and demonstrate an approach to reliably and
rapidly define plasmonic nanoparticles and their assemblies using
FIB milling <i>via</i> a simple “sketch and peel”
strategy. Systematic experimental investigations and mechanism studies
reveal that the high reliability of this fabrication approach is enabled
by a conformally formed sidewall coating due to the ion-milling-induced
redeposition. Particularly, we demonstrated that this strategy is
also applicable to the state-of-the-art helium ion beam milling technology,
with which high-fidelity plasmonic dimers with tiny gaps could be
directly and rapidly prototyped. Because the proposed approach enables
rapid and reliable patterning of arbitrary plasmonic nanostructures
that are not feasible to fabricate <i>via</i> conventional
FIB milling process, our work provides the FIB milling technology
an additional nanopatterning capability and thus could greatly increase
its popularity for utilization in fundamental research and device
prototyping