Creating innovative 3D nanostructures

An international team of scientists working with the

has built new nanoscale structures from a self-assembling material, with potential applications ranging from catalysis and chemical separation to semiconductor manufacturing.

The team has discovered that materials known as block copolymers will spontaneously assemble into intricate 3-D shapes when deposited onto 2-D surface patterns created with photolithography. The result demonstrates that complex, 3-D nanostructures can be built by using existing semiconductor industry tools.

Lithography is already used to make devices with dimensions substantially smaller than 100 nanometres, but photolithography is currently only applied as a two-dimensional process. The new process allows photolithography to be used in three dimensions, creating structures completely different from the original block copolymer materials.

The team has produced structures consisting of tightly interwoven, yet completely independent, networks of channels and passages on an atomic scale. The networks register with the photolithographic pattern underneath, letting scientists know exactly where each channel ends and giving them access to channel openings.