Nanofacet lithography: A new bottom-up approach to nanopatterning and nanofabrication by soft replication of spontaneously faceted crystal surfaces

The faceting of unstable crystal surfaces provides self-assembling templates for soft lithography, enabling the facile generation of a variety of periodic nanopatterned monolayers, nanowires, nanogrooves, nanogrids, and nanowaffles of An and Si (the figure shows the replication of faceted sapphire to an elastomeric stamp, and then to a patterned self-assembled monolayer).