Wafer-scale fabrication of plasmonic crystals from patterned silicon templates prepared by nanosphere lithography

By combining nanosphere lithography with template stripping, silicon wafers were patterned with hexagonal arrays of nanowells or pillars. These silicon masters were then replicated in gold by metal evaporation, resulting in wafer-scale hexagonal gratings for plasmonic applications. In the nanosphere lithography step, two-dimensional colloidal crystals of 510 nm diameter polystyrene spheres were assembled at the air-water interface and transferred to silicon wafers. The spheres were etched in oxygen plasma in order to define their size for masking of the silicon wafer. For fabrication of metallic nanopillar arrays, an alumina film was grown over the nanosphere layer and the spheres were then removed by bath sonication. The well pattern was defined in the silicon wafer by reactive ion etching in a chlorine plasma. For fabrication of metal nanowell arrays, the nanosphere monolayer was used directly as a mask and exposed areas of the silicon wafer were plasma-etched anisotropically in SF6/Ar. Both techniques could be used to produce subwavelength metal replica structures with controlled pillar or well diameter, depth, and profile, on the wafer scale, without the use of direct writing techniques to fabricate masks or masters.