SWAN dive
New nanostructure fabrication
process up to 1 million times faster
Gold-coated glass shows structural
coloration which happens due to
the diffraction of light off surface
nanostructures.
A process for creating micro and nano-structures on three
dimensional (3D) objects holds great promise to usher in new nano-enabled applications in advanced materials and biotechnology.
The work, published in the journal Nanoscale in July, drastically reduces costs while speeding the production process by four
to six orders of magnitude, compared to current state of the art
techniques, according to Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering
doctoral student Zhou Ye, his advisor, Associate Professor Bahareh Behkam, and their collaborator, Associate Professor Amrinder
Nain.
Their process called Spun-Wrapped Aligned Nanofiber (SWAN)
lithography, can fabricate micro- and nano-structures on the
entire surface of any 3D object by applying polymer fibers,
about 500 times smaller than the diameter of human hair, over
an object, followed by etching areas of the object not covered
by the fiber, and then removing the fiber itself, thus resulting in
nano-textured gold surface. Gold film is widely used in biosensing
applications due to its non-reactive and conductive nature. With
SWAN lithography’s ability to pattern the entire 3D object independent of curvature, the sensing area along with the signal to
noise ratio are substantially increased. The process works on all
3D objects irrespective of their geometry, thereby overcoming a
major limitation of current methods which work only on simple
geometries (such as cylindrical objects) or flat surfaces.