Nanotribological properties of silicon surfaces nanopatterned by laser interference lithography

Abstract

The problems caused by the adhesive force and friction force become more critical when the size of M/NEMS devices shrinks to micro/nano-scale. The nanotexture-patterned surface is an effective approach to reduce friction force on micro/nano-scale. Laser interference lithography is an attractive method to fabricate micro/nanotextures, which is maskless and allows large area periodical structures to be patterned by a couple of seconds' exposure in a simple equipment system. We fabricate various nanogrooves with different pitch and space width on silicon wafers by laser interference lithography and chemical etching. We investigate the nanotribological properties of the patterned surfaces by AFM/FFM. We show that friction on the nano/micro-scale is related to the coverage rate of the nanogrooves, which decreases with increase in the space width and decrease in the pitch.

Properties and applications of polysilanes

“…In the photolithography process, a layer of polysilane is spin coated onto a silicon wafer to act as a photoresist . The material is then exposed to UV, where the irradiated part of the polysilane degrades.…”

AFM-based tribological study of nanopatterned surfaces: the influence of contact area instabilities

“…This criticality is linked to the difficulty in controlling the contact area between the probe and the surface in atomic force microscopy (AFM), the leading technique for tribological characterization at the nanoscale. For this reason, a time consuming statistical approach is necessary to be able to reduce the experimental errors [3,13,16,25,27,31,35]. However, this approach could still lead to ambiguous results.…”