Colloidal lithography [1] is how patterns are reproduced in a variety of
natural systems and is used more and more as an efficient fabrication tool in
bio-, opto-, and nano-technology. Nanoparticles in the colloid are made to form
a mask on a given material surface, which can then be transferred via etching
into nano-structures of various sizes, shapes, and patterns [2,3]. Such
nanostructures can be used in biology for detecting proteins [4] and DNA [5,6],
for producing artificial crystals in photonics [7,8] and GHz oscillators in
spin-electronics [9-14]. Scaling of colloidal patterning down to 10-nm and
below, dimensions comparable or smaller than the main relaxation lengths in the
relevant materials, including metals, is expected to enable a variety of new
ballistic transport and photonic devices, such as spin-flip THz lasers [15]. In
this work we extend the practice of colloidal lithography to producing
large-area, near-ballistic-injection, sub-10 nm point-contact arrays and
demonstrate their integration in to spin-photo-electronic devices.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
