As always, our Micrograph Award honors the incredible work our customers are doing with their RAITH systems.
It was a very tight race for the first three places once again, and for the first time they all go to customers in the Americas. However, since there were so many other very impressive submissions, we again decided to present four Honorable Mention Awards alongside the Art Award. So congratulations to all the winners, and thank you for sharing your work with us!
First place – 3D Surface in a Multiple Material Stack by Grayscale Lithography
Raphael Dawant from the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada bowled us over with his work in creating a 3D surface using a single plasma-etching step and grayscale lithography on a multiple material stack. He used their EBPG to expose the 3D resist profile, which was then transferred using DRIE.
The image on the left shows the 3D surface of the resist after grayscale exposure and development. The thickness of the resist goes from 0 to 500 nm. The color bar shows the corresponding thickness of the resist for each color. The picture on the right shows the 3D surface of the multiple material stack after DRIE transfer. The color bar shows the remaining height of the stack for each color: only Al and partial TiOx thickness remain in the light blue tone, while the full 330 nm stack remains in the brilliant gold tone. The proposed method is used to fabricate an array of TiOx resistive memory cylinder junctions on top of an Al bottom electrode for the fabrication of resistive memory crossbars – see related publication in JVST B: avs.scitation.org
Second place - Optomechanical Crystal Nanobeam Cavities in Single Crystal Diamond
The second place was likewise awarded to a customer in Canada: Elham Zohari from the University of Alberta is working in the field of nanophotonics with the institution’s RAITH150 Two system. She shared her work on the fabrication of optomechanical crystal cavities, which involves using a quasi-isotropic undercutting procedure to define freestanding structures in bulk diamond.
Third place - Capillary-Assisted Particle Assembly of Plasmonic Nanoantennas
The third place goes to Benoit Debiolles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. Using the VELION FIB-SEM installed there, he was able to precisely assemble gold nanorods in an array of traps on a parylene-indium tin oxide-coated glass substrate. Each nanorod then acts as a plasmonic nanoantenna to transduce local voltage fluctuation into light.
Your chance to win
The Micrograph Award never sleeps! We’re already looking forward to the next submissions. Registration is open all year round, and if you enter a high-quality submission, your chances of winning a fully sponsored trip to a conference are very high!
Please note that evaluation is not only based on the quality of the picture, but also takes the scientific motivation and description of the work into account. So if you’ve created some interesting work with your RAITH system, take your chance––and maybe next year it will be you who will be going on a fully sponsored trip to a micro- or nanofabrication-related conference of your choice!