Pushing the boundaries of local oxidation nanolithography: Short timescales and high speeds

Fabrication of nanometre-scale structures in short timescales and with high throughput has great importance in the future of nanoscale science and technology. We show that the local oxidation of hydrogen-passivated silicon surfaces by intermittent-contact mode atomic force microscopy can be applied on timescales as low as 500 ns to create single oxide nanostructures with dimensions of 0.6×15 nm2. Furthermore, we report on preliminary experiments demonstrating that local oxidation can also be achieved with relative tip-sample speeds in excess of 2 cm s−1 in order to pattern larger areas. This was realised using a high-speed scan stage based on a quartz crystal resonator operating at 20 kHz.