Molecular Self-Assembly of Carbon Nanosheets via AFM Nanoprinting

Abstract

Traditional nanofabrication methods are currently enabled by top-down and more recently, bottom-up approaches. The former involves highly specialized equipment and processes, such as photolithography, electron beam lithography, and focused ion beam milling, to etch or deposit materials at the nanoscale. These methods are well-established and widely used in the semiconductor industry, but they often require expensive equipment, complex processes, and employ environmentally harmful chemicals. The latter approach, bottom-up nanofabrication, has recently gained popularity due to its potential for low-cost, highly customizable, and environmentally friendly fabrication of nanoscale structures, though many challenges still exist with developing a scalable manufacturing method. As such, a variety of techniques have been investigated to enable bottom-up nanofabrication, including 2 photon polymerization (2PP), electrohydrodynamic jet printing, dip-pen nanolithography, and solid-state polymerization among others. In this thesis, we propose a new bottom-up nanofabrication approach by combining molecular self-assembly with atomic force microscopy (AFM), which we believe has the potential to create devices with unprecedented properties and functionalities in both the technological and biological domains. To this end, we first present the development of a proof-of-concept custom AFM nanoprinter for the molecular self-assembly of carbon nanosheets, and subsequently, we explore the design, fabrication, and initial testing protocols of custom 2PP-printed FluidFM cantilevers as an alternative to traditional FluidFM probes for more general AFM nanoprinting applications.