Direct fabrication of Ordered Polymer nanocavity Arrays from Surface-Modified ion- nanostructured silicon Templates

Ion-beam nanopatterned silicon has been used as template for the direct molding of polymeric materials. The silicon surface was chemically modified by octadecyltrichlorosilane before molding in order to allows easy polymer release. This fabrication process allows us to produce a nanocavity polymer array from a nanodot structured silicon template with a lateral and vertical resolutions of 50 nm and 5 nm, respectively. Both, the use of the nanopatterned silicon template and tapping mode atomic force microscopy at low tip-sample interaction forces allow us to determine not only the lateral and vertical resolution of this new method but also the error involved in the transfer process, which results to be of 1nm. Thus. the new method fulfils the requirements of serial nanofabrication trends that requires sub-100 nm lateral resolution and sub-10nm vertical resolution involving only a few and very simple steps during the whole nanofabrication process. Besides, the method displays a proved high fidelity in the molding process showing its potential applications as a direct nanofabrication route for future information storage technologies.