| The rapid development of nano-science and technology, as well as the industry of micro-electronics raises the increasing demands for the sub-diffraction-limited photolithography technology. Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPs), a type of the collective electrons oscillation on metal surface demonstrating the characteristics of the strong field enhancement and confinement in near field, opens a new way to achieve the photolithography pattern beyond the diffraction limit. Metal-dielectric multilayered structure (MDMS), as one of the simplest 1-D Metamaterials, can act as an effective carrier to selectively transmit the surface waves with high-spatial frequency to the MDMS exit, and obtain highly localized optical field for nanoscale photolithography.In this paper, SPs photolithography based on Grating-Ag/SiO2 multilayer has been theoretically and numerically investigated. Based on the filtering analysis of the MDMS by transfer matrix method (TMM) and effective medium theory (EMT), an optimized MDMS has been designed and proposed, only allowing a narrow band of high frequency components to pass through. Moreover, under the illumination of 405nm wavelength with TM polarization, the lithography pattern with spatial resolution beyond 19.5nm was numerically achieved by the finite element method.Furthermore, using effect of SPs microcavity resonance, we has designed and proposed a novel Ag/SiO2 multilayer SPs cavity, which can greatly extend and enhance the localized field in SPs cavity by vertical coupling effect of SPs. Thanks to the remarkably enhanced SPs localized field by cavity resonance, the depth and contrast of photolithography pattern has been greatly improved. The characteristic offered by this proposed method hold the great potential in many applications such as industrial nano-scale semiconductor device manufacture, super-resolution imaging and high sensitive sensing, etc. |
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