Proton beam writing of microstructures at the ion nanoprobe LIPSION

Proton beam writing (PBW) is a direct writing technique which allows the creation of three-dimensional structures with a high aspect ratio in the micrometer and nanometer range in photoresist materials without the use of templates. At the high-energy ion nanoprobe LIPSION of the University of Leipzig this technique was established recently. In this article the latest results concerning this topic are presented. PBW was successfully performed with the positive resist polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) which is now used at LIPSION in addition to the negative resist SU-8. With the new data acquisition system MICRODAS being commissioned, a new scan program was developed and tested which is dedicated to the creation of arbitrarily shaped structures. Squares with dimensions down to 1.2 μm were created in SU-8 at LIPSION. Furthermore, Ni grids were produced by electroplating, using templates written in PMMA resist. In addition, first structures for studying the growing behavior of Bragg reflectors and the optical characterisation of ZnO nanowhiskers were produced by PBW.