Patterning Concept For Sculptured Nanostructures With Arbitrary Periods

An approach to deposit sculptured nanostructures with arbitrary interstructure spacing is presented. Based on a combination of glancing angle deposition with a preceding two-step electron beam lithography substrate patterning, the concept allows the deposition of nanostructures on artificial seeds at any predetermined place on the substrate. Due to the glancing angle deposition principle, with the help of an appropriate substrate rotation during deposition, those structures can additionally be shaped into nearly arbitrary morphologies. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, separated sculptured nanostructures of silicon with interstructure spacings of (10-20) mu m were assembled.