In this study liquid-phase nanolithography (LPN) techniques using conductive atomic force microscopy are investigated in order to study properties of nano-patterned organic molecules covalently bound to a silicon substrate. Previous work has shown that LPN in the inert organic solvent hexadecane forms patterned features on hydrogen-passivated Si(111). Due to hexadecane’s inert nature, it is believed that the features are formed by field-induced oxidation of the silicon substrate rather than by patterning hexadecane molecules on the surface. To investigate this hypothesis, the effects of lithographic parameters in the hexadecane system are compared with those in published data on field-induced oxidation of hydrogen-passivated silicon. Due to the number of reports analyzing line- and dot-patterned field-induced oxides, similar geometries of LPN features are also considered in this study. Initial analysis of LPN line patterns formed in hexadecane shows that these features are in fact due to fieldinduced oxidation. However, to increase the accuracy and validity of such findings, additional experiments and analysis are under way. Such findings will enable control and optimization of future experiments of patterning organic solute molecules in hexadecane on silicon via LPN.

Last modified

• 07/16/2018

Creator

• Matthew J. Schmitz
• C. Reagan Kinser
• Mark Hersam

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N24404

Keyword

• Volume 2

Date created

• 2005

Resource type

• Article

Rights statement

• In Copyright