| New applications in electronics and optics require methods of forming micro- and nanostructures in ways that are applicable to different classes of materials and substrates. These methods should also be simple, inexpensive, and accessible to the greatest number of users possible. This dissertation explores several unconventional methods of forming micro- and nanostructures for electronic and optical applications. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the most prominent method of nanofabrication in this dissertation, nanoskiving, which is the use of mechanical sectioning of encapsulated thin films to generate nanostructures. Several ancillary techniques are used to prepare substrates for nanoskiving: shadow evaporation, chemical synthesis, electrodeposition, soft lithographic molding, spin-coating, and rolling. Chapter 2, Appendix I, II, and IV, survey the materials and methods of nanoskiving. Appendices III and VI describe combinations of nanoskiving with soft lithographic molding to generate and replicate two-dimensional structures for electronic and optical applications. Chapter 3 and Appendix V detail contact and non-contact methods to manipulate the structures produced by nanoskiving and transfer them to optical fibers and other optical structures. Chapter 4 and Appendix VII describe two additional forms of unconventional fabrication: shadow evaporation, and fabrication using a commercial nanoindentation system. Proof-of-principle applications demonstrated using nanoskiving include chemical sensors (Chapter I, Appendices I and V), substrates for electrodeposition (Appendix III), organic photodetectors (Appendix I), plasmonic waveguides (Appendix IV), and near-IR filters (Appendix VI); applications for nanoindentation include substrates for surfacc-enhanced Raman scattering (Appendix VII); and applications of shadow evaporation include field-effect transistors, logic gates, and other electronic structures (Chapter 4). |
