Nanoporous Templates

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Technology Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed simple and environmentally friendly methods for fabricating nanopatterned templates and substrates with highly oriented and ordered nanodomains or nanostructures. Metal-coated block copolymer films with highly ordered nanoscale cylindrical pores oriented normal to the film surface can be fabricated by using simple solvent vapor annealing, film reconstruction, and glancing angle metal evaporation processes. By controlling the thickness of the metal layer and the thermal annealing conditions, two other types of metal-decorated, nanopatterned films with nanodots or nanoring-shaped voids can be generated. These metal-decorated films can be used as masks or templates for subsequent pattern transfer into underlying substrates with high fidelity via etching, or as scaffolds for the fabrication of arrays of nanoscopic elements from any material that can be evaporated, sputtered or electrochemically deposited into the voids of the nanopatterned films.