Large-area microfabrication of three-dimensional, helical polymer structures

A technique has been developed to fabricate polymeric helixes with sub-micron dimensions. These helixes are made using a double-templating process, in which an inorg. thin film deposited using glancing angle deposition acts as the master. The shape, pitch, handedness and no. of turns of the polymer helixes can be tuned by altering the deposition parameters of the master film. The structure of this pos. master is copied into a neg. intermediate template of photoresist, which itself acts as a master for the templating of polymer helixes. This process is demonstrated with four multifunctional acrylates. The master, intermediate template and polymer helixes are characterized using SEM, and the polymer helixes are characterized using energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy. It is shown that a large no. of polymer helical microstructures, which are anchored to both a thick substrate and a thin capping layer, can be made in parallel over areas of mm2 to cm2.