Nanolithography: What's the Point

A paper entitled 'Floating Tip Nanolithography' appeared in my RSS reader this morning. I make it a point to scoff when I see the nano- prefix being overused, but this got me questioning the whole field (assuming nanolithography is considered a field?), not just the world itself. There's too much nanostuff, but that's the point I'm making here. (And in the paper they do say: "NANO" revolution, sigh.) Why do nanolithography at all? Is this just some proof of concept idea?

The wiki entry tells me that it's used for creating microcircuitboards. Okay, that's useful enough, but from what I've seen from nanolithography papers, it's just people writing the names of their universities on a surface.



Here, a paper shows that by using a hot, floating AFM tip, they can get better resolution. They coat a gold surface with a polymer, then melt it off. Good, now you can write your name more clearly. With this method they were able to draw smaller images, with letters 100nm wide, while some of the older techniques (for example, physically scratching a surface with a sharp AFM tip) weren't able to clearly write.

Is there more to this field that I'm missing?

Milner, A.A., Zhang, K., Prior, Y. (2008). Floating Tip Nanolithography. Nano Letters DOI: 10.1021/nl801203c


This posted tagged as: journals, science

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