Self-assembled silica nanotrench arrays using surfactant templates

A new self-assembly technique is proposed to fabricate sub-10 nm wide nanotrench array, which is an improved self-assembled process with the direction of surfactant templates. First, the surface of substrate is modified with surfactant P123 to aid the alignment of the surfactant templates micelles in the silica/surfactant solution dip-coated on the substrate during the next step, which improves the order and straightness of silica nanotrench arrays. Next, the silica/surfactant solution is dip-coated on the modified substrate and aged. The type of surfactant as well as corresponding process of self-assembly route determines the desired pattern feature size. Finally, the surfactant templates are removed by calcination or extraction, only inorganic silica trench arrays on the substrate survive. With this technique, ordered arrays of less than 10 nm wide silica nanotrenches separated by below 5 nm-wide walls were successfully fabricated without the conventional lithography/etch progress. This process can be applied to fabricate the nanotrench on any substrate which can be coated with the P123 layer.