Atom lithography with chromium can be utilized to fabricate a pitch standard, which is chrectly traceable to me wavelength of the laser standing waves. The result of a calibrated commercial AFM measurement demonstrates that the pitch standard is （212.8±0.1） nm with a peak-to-valley-height （PTVH） better than 20 nm. The measurement results show the high period accuracy of traceability with the standing laser wavelength （λ/2 = 212.78 nm）. The Cr nano-grating covers a 1000μm×500 μm area, with a PTVH better than 10 nm. The feature width broadening of the Cr nanostructure has been experimentally observed along the direction of the standing waves. The PTVH along the Gaussian laser direction is similar to a Gaussian distribution. Highly uniform periodic nanostructures with a big area at the millimeter scale, and the surface growth uniformity of the Cr nano-grating, show its great potential in the application of a traceable pitch standard at trans-scales.
Laser-focused atomic deposition is a technique with which nearly resonant light is used to pattern an atom beam.To solve the problem that the result of laser-cooled atoms cannot be monitored during the 30-min depositing time,we present a three-hole mechanically precollimated aperture apparatus.A 425 nm laser light standing wave is used to focus a beam of chromium atoms to fabricate the nanoscale grating.The period of the grating is 213±0.1 nm,the height is 4 nm and the full width at half miximum is 64±6 nm.
MA YanLI Tong-BaoWU WenXIAO Yi-LiZHANG Ping-PingGONG Wei-Gang
This paper presents the experimental progress of laser-focused Cr atomic deposition and the experimental condition. The result is an accurate array of lines with a periodicity of 212.8±0.2 nm and mean full-width at half maximum as approximately 95 nm. Surface growth in laser-focused Cr atomic deposition is modeled and studied by kinetic Monte Carlo simulation including two events： the one is that atom trajectories in laser standing wave are simulated with the semiclassical equations of motion to obtain the deposition position; the other is that adatom diffuses by considering two major diffusion processes, namely, terrace diffusion and step-edge descending. Comparing with experimental results （Anderson W R, Bradley C C, McClelland J J and Celotta R J 1999 Phys. Rev. A 59 2476）, it finds that the simulated trend of dependence on feature width is in agreement with the power of standing wave, the other two simulated trends are the same in the initial stage. These results demonstrate that some surface diffusion processes play important role in feature width broadening. Numerical result also shows that high incoming beam flux of atoms deposited redounds to decrease the distance between adatoms which can diffuse to minimize the feature width and enhance the contrast.
