 | Electron-Beam Lithography. It is one of the most widely used techniques, using a beam of electrons to generate nano-patterns of any shape and ultra-high resolution. We employ e-beam lithography both for the realization of photolithographic masks and master templates for subsequent Soft Lithographies, and for direct nanopatterning on active materials including conjugated polymers. Read more | 
|  | Nanoimprint Lithography. The Nanoimprint technology consists in the compression molding of thermoplastic polymers. Being based on the glass-transition phenomenology of thermoplastics, this process allows the polymer to conform with the mold pattern. In order to obtain a high-quality pattern transfer by thermal cycles, one needs a good thermoplastic behaviour of the target compounds. However, this can hardly be accomplished in small molecules, which has so far prevented their use as directly printed active materials, even if many low-molar-mass compounds have been found to exhibit excellent luminescence and optical gain performances. For these reasons, we developed nanoimprinting at room temperature on light-emitting materials, for the realisation of one-step printed organic semiconductor lasers employing distributed feedback resonators. Read more |
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Soft Lithography. Soft Lithographies include a class of patterning approaches, all of them characterized by the use of elements fabricated by texturing elastomeric polymers, to transfer a pattern to a substrate. Soft Lithography produces faithful copies of complex features initially present on a master, and accomplishes sub-100 nm resolution. Even more important, the chemico-physical properties elastomers confer these technologies, moreover being easy and inexpensive to be performed, an unequalled chemical flexibility to produce nanostructures and nanosystems for chemistry, biology and opto- and nanoelectronics. Read more | | |  | Two-photons Lithography. Two photons absorption processes allow one to obtain feature sizes in the subwavelength regime, and excellent definition and resolution can be esperically achieved by very short laser pulses avoiding damages to the resist materials and the substrates. Main advantage, compared to one-photon optical lithography, is the possibility of writing in the axial direction, thus allowing one to fabricate fully 3D structures. The tweezers setup is used by us for two photons lithography, ongoing research being focused on the realization of 3D photonic structures in organic resins and conjugated polymers. Read more |
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