Nanofabrication & Materials Discovery
We have developed a physical fabrication method, that allows us to rapidly grow of hundreds of billions of ‘designer’ nano-structures. Unlike any other growth method, it can combine multiple functional materials and be used to tune the shape when growing complex 3D nanostructures. Our current research focus is on including combinatorial methods where we can obtain shape and material gradients in one growth. This is of interest for materials discovery & sensing applications.
We use a highly parallel and fast patterning method, known as block co-polymer micellar nanolithography, to obtain a monolayer of 5nm seed particles that are spaced apart and deposit these on an entire wafer. The seeds serve as nucleation points for a physical vapor shadow (glancing angle) deposition. Under computer control and cooling the substrate can be manipulated, angled and rotated during the vapor deposition, such that discrete nano-structures grow in a highly parallel fashion on the seed particles and on an entire wafer in parallel. We can easily program shapes and the resultant structures are uniform. We use our fabrication setups to grow designer nanostructures for a range of projects, e.g.:
- Nanopropellers for tissue penentration
- Photonic nanoantennas for sensing
- Chemical nanomotors for active matter research
- Magnetic nanostructures for nanorobotics
- Metal oxides for gas sensing
- Thin films and coatings
- Materials discovery
- Chiral plasmonics
"Plasmonic nanostructure engineering with shadow growth", H. Jang-Hwan, D. Kim, J. Kim, G. Kim, P. Fischer, H.-H. Jeong, Adv. Mat. 2107917, (2022).
"Combinatorial growth of multinary nanostructured thin functional films", H. Barad, N. Alarcon-Correa, G. Salinas, E. Oren, F. Peter, A. Kuhn, P. Fischer, Materials Today 50, 89-99, (2021).
“Hybrid nanocolloids with programmed 3D-shape and material composition”, A.G. Mark, J.G. Gibbs, T.-C. Lee, P.Fischer, Nature Materials 12, 802 (2013).