Zero-nanometer Technology: A Wafer-length and Wafer-scale Platform Integrating Continuously Varying Gap Size Samples from Nanometers to Microns Into a Single One

Abstract

Modern nanotechnologies such as scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) or atomic force microscopy (AFM) heavily rely on intricate platforms to control and maintain the gap width between two objects. These mature quantum technologies have their applications largely limited to imaging or to single molecular manipulations because of their small device footprints area of 0.1-100 nm2. For photonic, molecular electronic, electrochemical, and catalytic applications, we need to vastly increase the effective area of gap control, to truly a macroscopic scale (Fig. 1). The wafer-length gaps are tunable from 1 to 10,000 nm, with the ‘zero nanometer’ essentially being frequency dependent. Quantum conductance actions over the wafer-length nanotrenches spanning tunneling, quantized conductance and semi-classical regimes produce an extinction better than 10,000 repeatable over 100,000 times in real time for microwave incidents. Our results bridge the gap between the quantum world to the macroscopic one and we anticipate wide ranging applications in many areas of engineering and science. Fig. 1 Inspiration behind the wafer-scale tunable zerogap platform. Conventional STM, AFM, and SPM technologies have a single device footprint of a dimension ~nm2. While these single, variable point-gap technologies provide images of unprecedented accuracy and lead to many discoveries, large-area quantum platform is required for industrial applications. One-dimensional, curtain-like variable gap would enlarge the device footprint but is largely hypothetical. Thereby, on flexible substrate such as PDMS, wafer-length, zero-to-1000 nm tunable gaps are realized with many potential applications. Scale bars are 10 mm. SEM and optical microscopic images of the gaps in action are presented at the bottom half.