Polyethylene glycol as a novel resist and sacrificial material for generating positive and negative nanostructures

Polyethylene glycol has proved to be a novel resist and sacrificial material for generating positive and negative nanostructures using dip-pen nanolithography (DPN). DPN templates of the PEG features were used as a protective layer to generate raised or recessed structures on surfaces and in the experiment a cantilever array with 26 tips was dipped into a 5 mg mL ^-1 acetonitrile solution of PEG for 10 seconds and then mounted on an NSCRIPTOR and used to generate dots and lines on gold surfaces. A 26-pen parallel array was used to generate 26 15 × 20 PEG dot arrays on a gold thin-film substrate. The PEG resist when coupled with wet chemical etching, allows to generate solid-state nanostructures and as a result, positive solid-state nanostructures were generated on direct incubation of the PEG-patterned substrate in the same aqueous etching solution.