A Chemical Solution Deposition Route To Nanopatterned Inorganic Material Surfaces

Abstract

TiO2, Al2O3, and ZrO2 patterns (or masks) composed of ordered nanomotifs of various morphologies (i.e., perforations (craters), rings, canyons, wires, dots, or channels) with typical lateral dimensions of <40 nm and thicknesses below 15 nm are presented. They were simply prepared by chemical solution deposition (CSD) of molecular inorganic precursors and commercial block copolymers on bare or hydrophobised silicon wafer surfaces. The various nanostructures are obtained by self-assembly during evaporation and are subsequently stabilized at 500 °C. Compared to other techniques for surface nanopatterning, the present method has the advantage of being cheap, reproducible, and easy to scale up and does not require specialized equipment. The type, dimension, and organization of these motifs were assessed by AFM, FE-SEM, spectroscopic ellipsometry, and GI-SAXS and are shown to depend on the conditions of preparation. We show that the critical parameters for controlling the nanopattern characteristics are the organic to inorganic ratio, the solvent composition, the substrate surface energy, the evaporation temperature, and the quantity of initial solution deposited on the substrate. XPS investigation was used to access the chemical composition of the nanopatterns on the SiO2 surface.