Nanophotonic Fabrication

The unique phenomena originating from dressed photon exchange have been applied also to the development of novel high-resolution fabrication techniques. As has been described in Sect. 1.2 (refer to (1.3) and (1.4) and Fig. 1.3), the principle of fabrication utilizes the dressed photon, which carries the coherent phonon energy (DP-CP). Several examples are reviewed in this section. 

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Recently, Lin et al. [81] used focused ion beam (FIB] milling to pattern photonic crystals [PhCs] with lattice periods of 300 nm to 1 pm. The milled surface was smooth, indicating FIB can be an effective method for nanophotonic fabrication. However, the major question for this method is the scalability of the process for large-scale devices. 

Nanophotonic Fabrications, Devices, Systems, and Their Theoretical Bases By M. Ohtsu (Ed.), 2006,122 figs., XIV, 188 pages... 

Ohtsu M., Kobayashi K., Kawazoe T., Sangu S., and Yatsui T. (2002). Nanophotonics design, fabrication, and operation of nanometric devices using optical near fields. IEEE J. Sel Top. Quantum Electron. 8 839-862. 

Nanolithography The art of fabricating nanoelectronics, nanophotonics and nanobiology devices and systems... 

A nanophotonic level. Fabricated in silicon on insulator with the appropriate device structure... 

Optofluidics Techniques for Fabrication and Integration, Fig. 1 Nanoscale optofluidic integration. Sample fabrication procedure for combining micro- and nanofluidics with nanophotonic structures... 

Nanophotonics Dressed Photon Technology for Qualitatively Innovative Optical Devices, Fabrication, and Systems... 

Nanophotonics, proposed by the author in 1993 [1-3], is a novel optical technology that utilizes the optical near-field. The optical near-field is the dressed photons that mediate the interaction between nanometric particles located in close proximity to each other. Nanophotonics allows the realization of qualitative innovations in photonic devices, fabrication techniques, and systems by utilizing novel functions and phenomena enabled by optical near-field interactions that would otherwise be impossible if only conventional propagating light were used. In this sense, the principles and concepts of nanophotonics are completely different from those of conventional wave-optical technology, encompassing photonic crystals, plasmon-ics, metamaterials, and silicon photonics. This review describes these differences and shows examples of such qualitative innovations. 

Examples of the patterns fabricated by this machine are a 40 nm-linewidth linear pattern (Fig. 1.28a), a high-aspect-ratio pattern (Fig. 1.28b), a pattern with a minimum linewidth of 22 nm realized by making high-resolution photoresist (Fig. 1.28c), two-dimensional arrays of rings and disks (Fig. 1.28d, e), and so on [53]. This machine has been made available for public use since April 2006. Examples of its use include the fabrication of a two-dimensional array of room-temperature operated nanophotonic NOT gates composed of InAs QDs (refer to Fig. 1.11), linear and curved Si optical waveguides, and so on. 

As shown in Fig. 2,15, we created a sample device to experimentally demonstrate the retrieval of a nanophotonic code within an embossed hologram. The entire device structure, whose size was 15 mm x 20 mm, was fabricated by electron-beam lithography on an Si substrate, followed by sputtering a 50 nm-thick Au layer, as schematically shown in the cross-sectional profile in Fig. 2.15b. 

Fig. 2.15 (a) Fabrication of a nanometric structure as a nanophotonic code within the embossed stmcture of Virtuagram , and SEM images of various designed patterns serving as nanophotonic codes. 

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