Interferometric lithography (IL) is a powerful technique for the definition of large-area, nanometer-scale, periodically patterned structures. Patterns are recorded in a light-sensitive medium, such as a photoresist, that responds nonlinearly to the intensity distribution associated with the interference of two or more coherent beams of light. The photoresist patterns produced with IL are a platform for further fabrication of nanostructures and growth of functional materials and are building blocks for devices. This article provides a brief review of IL technologies and focuses on various applications for nanostructures and functional materials based on IL including directed self-assembly of colloidal nanoparticles, nanophotonics, semiconductor materials growth, and nanofluidic devices. Perspectives on future directions for IL and emerging applications in other fields are presented.

In the past few years, there has been increasing interest in surface plasmon-polaritons, as a result of the strong near-field enhancement of the electric fields at a metal-dielectric interface. Here we show the first demonstration of a monolithically integrated plasmonic focal plane array (FPA) in the mid-infrared region, using a metal with a two-dimensional hole array on top of an intersubband quantum-dots-in-a-well (DWELL) heterostructure FPA coupled to a read-out integrated circuit. Excellent infrared imagery was obtained with over a 160% increase in the ratio of the signal voltage (V s ) to the noise voltage (V n ) of the DWELL camera at the resonant wavelength of λ = 6.1 µm. This demonstration paves the way for the development of a new generation of pixel-level spectropolarimetric imagers, which will enable bio-inspired (for example, colour vision) infrared sensors with enhanced detectivity (D*) or higher operating temperatures.

We demonstrate a nanoscale, subpicosecond (ps) metamaterial device capable of terabit/second all-optical communication in the near-IR. The 600 fs response, 2 orders of magnitude faster than previously reported, is achieved by accessing a previously unused regime of high-injection level, subpicosecond carrier dynamics in the α-Si dielectric layer of the metamaterial. Further, we utilize a previously unrecognized, higher-order, shorter-wavelength negative-index resonance in the fishnet structure, thereby extending device functionality (via structural tuning of device dimensions) over 1.0−2.0 μm. The pump energy required to modulate a single bit is only 3 nJ over our current 700 μm2 area device and can be easily scaled into the picoJoule regime with smaller cross sectional areas.