Controllable nanofabrication based on the interference of surface plasmons

Metamaterials open new vistas in optics, whose properties are engineered by controlled by their nanostructure, now one of the most captivating efforts is how to fabricate this new class of materials. The potential of using surface plasmons (SPs) to manipulate light in the subwavelength space opens up a multitude of new possibilities for subwavelength lithography. In this paper, localized surface plasmon nanolithography (LSPN) technique using the significant localization characteristic of SPs is proposed and demonstrated to produce patterns with a sub-wavelength line width; moreover, the localized energy at the very taper tip can be modulated merely via beforehand programming and reasonably controlling the corresponding interference of SPs which are excited by two distinct structures, namely, the grating and the nanotaper. Detailedly speaking, the localized energy can be modulated consecutively with a constant periodicity, and the modulation range of energy is extremely wide, for instance, the maximum energy is nearly 3 orders of magnitude larger than the minimum by our FDTD simulation results. It suggests a potential way to produce patterns with different depths and critical widths in one chip.