Catalytic purification of directly written nanostructured Pt microelectrodes

In the majority of cases, nanostructures prepared by focused electron beam induced deposition employing an organometallic precursor contain predominantly carbon-based ligand dissociation products. This is unfortunate with regard to using this high-resolution direct-write approach for the preparation of nanostructures for various fields, such as mesoscopic physics, micromagnetism, metaoptical phenomena in the visible spectral range, or others. Following early attempts of postprocessing Pt-based structures prepared by focused electron beam induced deposition at several hundred degrees Celsius in a reactive gas atmosphere, recent work has focused on developing in situ purification processes by using a stationary O2 flux in combination with electron irradiation to oxidize the carbonaceous component of the deposits. Here we show that this purification process is driven by the catalytic activity of Pt and in fact does not rely on the parallel electron irradiation process to function, if the O2 exposure is done in a pulsed fashion. We suggest a multistep cleaning mechanism which results in pure, nanoporous Pt. By suitably chosen beam parameters, high-resolution Pt dot and line structures with dimensions below 10 nm can thus be conveniently obtained. In temperature-dependent resistance measurements, we find the typical metallic behavior of Pt. In low-temperature magnetoresistance measurements, we see clear evidence for weak antilocalization effects and deduce a dephasing length of 234 nm at 1.2 K. We consider this to be a promising starting point for developing this approach into a versatile preparation technique for Pt-based mesoscopic structures, in particular since the purification process can be run in parallel on different deposits. We furthermore anticipate that our results will spur further research on purification approaches for nanostructures prepared by focused electron beam induced deposition containing a catalytically active metal species such as Pd-, Fe-, or Co-based deposits.