Generation of plasmonic Au nanostructures in the visible wavelength using two-dimensional parallel dip-pen nanolithography

The fabrication and characterization of over millimeter (mm)-scale Au plasmonic structures are reported. Fishnet structures of Au are fabricated by the bottom-up (direct deposition of alkanethiol) and top-down (wet-etching of Au) combined approach using massively parallel dip-pen nanolithography (DPN). An array of two-dimensional (2D) parallel 55 000 pens was used for the DPN writing of 1-octadecanethiol (ODT) on an Au film in an area of 10 mm x 10 mm. The plasmonic resonance of the over millimeter-scale Au fishnet structures is shown at the visible region around 500 nm, which is measured by ellipsometrical experiments and theoretical finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) calculation. It was demonstrated that massive metal plasmonic structures can be conveniently obtained by using DPN, complementary with both e-beam lithography and nanoimprint lithography.