High-speed plasmonic nanolithography with a solid immersion lens-based plasmonic optical head

This letter describes the use of a plasmonic optical head to achieve high-speed nanopatterning. A plasmonic optical head employs both a sharp-ridged nanoaperture and a nanogap control to maintain the nanogap required for near-field nanolithography. The nanogap control uses a gap error signal produced by evanescent coupling through the air-gap. We demonstrate that a plasmonic optical head achieves a patterning resolution of 70 nm and a patterning speed of 100 mm/s. The proposed combination of a surface plasmon nanoaperture and a nanogap servo system is one of the strategies used to achieve high-speed, high-resolution nanolithography.