An optical leveling technique for parallel near-field photolithography system.

An optical leveling technique is reported for a compact parallel (multi-cantilever) scanning near-field photolithography (SNP) prototype. This instrument operates in liquid and was designed to overcome the challenge of low sample throughput of previous serial scanning SNPs. A combination of zone plate lens array, probe array, and standard atomic force microscope feedback technique are employed to deliver parallel probe operation in the current SNP. Compared to the commonly used two-end or multi-end "force feedback" alignment techniques, the optical levelling technique applied provides a simple solution to maintaining all levers in an array within the near-field region. As a proof-of-principle experiment, the operation of the prototype was demonstrated by producing nano-scale patterns in parallel using scanning near-field photolithography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]