Flying plasmonic lens at near field for high speed nano-lithography

Optical lithography has been the key for continuous size reduction of semiconductor devices and circuits manufacturing. Although the industry is continually improving the resolution, optical lithography becomes more difficult and less cost effective in satisfying the ever increasing demands in nano-manufacturing. Besides manufacturing, the dramatic advancements in nanoscale science and engineering also call an urgent need for high-throughput nano-fabrication technologies that are versatile to frequent design changes. Here we experimentally demonstrated the capability of patterning with 50 nm linewidth with a high flying speed at 10 meter/second. This low-cost nano-fabrication scheme has the potential of a few orders of magnitude higher throughput than current maskless techniques, and promises a new route towards the next generation nano-manufacturing. Besides its application in nanolithography, this technique can also be used for nanoscale metrology, imaging and data storage.