Thiol-ene Polymer Mold For Nanoimprint Lihtography

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) is a nonconventional lithographic technique that has significant potential for various fields, such as electronics, photonics, magnetic devices and biological applications instead of traditional lithographic approaches for high-throughput patterning of polymer nanostructures at great precision and low costs. The mold is the crucial component for NIL and is typically fabricated on silicon, silicon dioxide, or quartz wafers using photolithography, interference lithography, or electron beam lithography, and then followed by reactive ion etching. The mold itself is both extremely expensive and time-consuming to fabricate. Therefore, due to the low-cost, simple process and abundant polymer materials, polymer molds for nanoimprint lithography are being developed quickly. In this thesis, we develop a series of UV-curable nanoimprint thiol-ene materials that have characteristics of low viscosity, high-resolution, rapid curable rates, low shrinkage and high Oxygen etching resistance. Based on thiol-ene polymerization which possesses various advantages such as rapid polymerization rates, minimal oxygen inhibition, low shrinkage, enormous range of both thiols and enes and controllable properties, we design a novel bi-layer polymer mold for nanoimprint lithography whose patterned layer consists of UV-curable nanoimprint thiol-ene materials and fabricate the mold by high-resolution UV-NIL at low pressure(<1bar) and room temperature.