Ion beam imprinting system for nanofabrication

An ion beam imprinting system has been developed in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In order to push ion beam imprinting technology to nanometer regime, it is very important to fabricate membranes with arrays of apertures only a few nanometers in diameter. In this article, we describe a simple method of forming nanopore arrays by simultaneously shrinking apertures of micrometer dimensions using plasma-assisted thin-film deposition. Nanopores of 13 nm in diameter and nanoslits of 20 nm in width have been fabricated.