Metal transfer assisted nanolithography on rigid and flexible substrates

A nanolithography technique based on metal transfer printing is demonstrated. The transferred metal conveniently acts as an etch mask for pattern transfer to a substrate. This lithography technique can be used on flexible plastic substrate as well as on rigid substrate due to the low pressure and temperature used in the metal transfer process. Dense nanosize metal particle arrays with different shapes such as square, diamond, and nanobar were created with high yield over large area, and localized surface plasmon spectra of those particle arrays were measured. Pattern linewidth was reduced to 50 nm in metal grating by depositing metals on the poly(dimethysiloxane) grating sidewall using a shadow evaporation process.