Various nanostructures on macroscopically large areas prepared by tunable ion-swelling

Various nanostructures were fabricated by ion irradiation on large area (100) Si surfaces covered by colloidal Langmuir-Blodgett films as nanolithographic masks. The ordered structure of the Langmuir-Blodgett monolayer composed from spherical Stöber silica particles of 200 nm and 450 nm diameter offer the possibility to form local surface swelling patterns during the ion bombardment step. Utilizing the dependence of the surface morphology on the irradiation parameters the tunability of nanostructuring was studied for 40 keV Ar+ and 500 keV Xe2+ ions. We show that the periodicity of the resulted surface pattern is determined by the size of the masking particles, while the height of nanostructures can be tuned by the ion fluence. The quality of projection of the nanomask contours to the substrate-the contrast of masking-can be set by choosing appropriate ion energy, thereby determining the curvature of the surface pattern. Moreover, deformation of the nanomask due to ion-nanoparticle interactions should be taken into account since these effects can be also utilized for tailoring various structures. The silica masking layers before and after ion irradiation and the resulting Si surface patterns were investigated by field emission scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy analysis.