Development of Nanosphere Lithography for Semiconductor Device Applications

Nanosphere lithography, a technique of generating hexagonally packed monolayers with nanospheres, has been studied and been shown to increase the efficiency of the devices such as light emitting diodes and solar cells. In this research, the fabrication of nanosphere lithography was explored with the aim of identifying robust deposition methods. Two resultant methods yielded large (1 cm by 1 cm) monolayers of nanospheres, with further mask modification via sphere diameter reduction using reactive ion etch. Photoluminescence (PL) measurements confirmed the existence of the monolayer and the enhancement due to the addition of nanospheres. A thin layer of aluminum was deposited onto samples after performing nanosphere lithography, with the nanospheres subsequently lifted off to create various aluminum structures. Finite-difference time-domain simulations were conducted to compare with PL data. Additional experiments and processes, such as the ones that create localized surface plasmon, nano-dots, etc., are outlined for future work