Abstract Reliable fabrication of metallic patterns at nanoscale is of great interest for various practical applications in nanodevices. Electron-beam-lithography based lift-off is the most often used method to define exquisite metal nanostructures at the 10-nm scale. In a common wet lift-off process, the metal material on top is lifted-off and washed away together with the sacrificial resist layer below. However, the wet lift-off process is sometimes ultrasonic agitation and/or heating-dependent and limited by the probable remained debris problem. In this work, we present an alternative lift-off process to obtain metallic patterns via removing the unwanted parts by using ion beam etching. We demonstrated that this ion-beam-etching based lift-off process is effective for isolated exposed negative-tone resist to fabricate nanoholes and nanoslits array and for dense networked exposed resist to fabricate high-density packed nanostructures. SERS measurements were conducted to demonstrate the molecular detection capability of the nanostructures with tiny gaps fabricated by this ion-beam-etching based lift-off process.

中文翻译：

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基于离子束蚀刻的剥离，可实现 10 纳米级致密和反向金属纳米结构的可靠图案化

摘要 在纳米尺度上可靠地制造金属图案对于纳米器件的各种实际应用具有重要意义。基于电子束光刻的剥离是定义 10 纳米级精细金属纳米结构的最常用方法。在常见的湿剥离工艺中，顶部的金属材料被剥离并与下方的牺牲抗蚀剂层一起被洗掉。然而，湿剥离过程有时依赖于超声波搅拌和/或加热，并受到可能残留碎屑问题的限制。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种替代的剥离工艺，通过使用离子束蚀刻去除不需要的部分来获得金属图案。我们证明了这种基于离子束蚀刻的剥离工艺对于制造纳米孔和纳米狭缝阵列的隔离暴露负性抗蚀剂以及用于制造高密度堆积纳米结构的致密网络暴露抗蚀剂是有效的。进行 SERS 测量以证明通过这种基于离子束蚀刻的剥离工艺制造的具有微小间隙的纳米结构的分子检测能力。