Lithography: Principles, processes and materials

Fabrications and applications of nanoscale metallic particles have attracted a lot of attention, because well-ordered nanoparticle arrays have already been found their potential for applications in many areas such as photonic crystals, as data storage media and in bio-sensors. The nanostructure fabrication technology such as electron beam lithography, ion beam lithography, focused ion beam (FIB), x-ray lithography, electron holographic lithography, laser interference lithography, and nanosphere lithography (NSL) etc. makes it possible to fabricate arbitrary shapes nanostructures. In this review, we will focus on the principles, processes and materials of the different lithography nanofabrication methods especially nanosphere lithography (NSL) and focus ion beam (FIB) nanofabrication method. NSL also named self-assembled processes technology is a low-cost, high-throughput lithography technique. Electron beam lithography (EBL) and focus ion beam (FIB) have the advantage of providing excellent control over nanoparticle size, shape and separation. Therefore it is important for us to explore the principles, processes and the materials of these methods. We can control the properties of the nanostructures by tuning the materials or processes of the fabrication methods.