High-speed nearfield optical recording using plasmonic flying head

Optical lithography has been the critical process for continuous size reduction of semiconductor devices and circuits manufacturing1, 2. As the industry is continually improving the lithography feature size, conventional optical lithography becomes more difficult and costive in satisfying the ever increasing demands in nano-manufacturing because of the fundamental limit of diffraction. Many maskless processes are capable of creating feature sizes better than optical lithography, but they all suffer from their low throughput. Here we experimentally demonstrated the capability of parallel patterning with 50 nm linewidth with a high flying speed at 10 meter/second. This is a low-cost high-throughput nano-fabrication scheme which has the potential of a few orders of magnitude higher throughput than current maskless techniques. It 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.