Fabrication of metallic nanostructures by negative nanoimprint lithography

This paper describes a negative nanoimprint lithography (N-NIL) technique for fabricating metallic nanostructures via combining conventional nanoimprint lithography (NIL) with wet chemical etching. Various metallic nanostructures such as gold grating, gold/chromium alternate bimetallic grating and gold nanoelectrode arrays, which are negative replications of the stamp pattern, have been fabricated with N-NIL. This method has demonstrated its advantages on varying the feature size of obtained metallic nanostructures with a single stamp as well as on fabricating bimetallic nanostructures. In addition, it offers a unique path to fabricate micro–nano complex structures in a single imprint process, which compensates the limitation of conventional nanoimprint lithography and maintains the advantages of conventional nanoimprint lithography such as high throughput, low cost and sub-100 nm resolution.