Fabrication of periodic nanostructures by single-point diamond turning with focused ion beam built tool tips

Periodic nanostructures have been widely used on emerging nano-products such as plasmonic solar cell and nano-optics. However, lack of cost-effective fabrication techniques has become the bottleneck for commercialization of these nano-products. In this work, we develop a scale up approach to fabricate high-precision nanostructures in large area. In this method, a nano-scale single crystal diamond (SCD) tool is produced by focused ion beam (FIB) machining. The nano SCD tool is then further applied to cut periodic nanostructures using single-point diamond turning (SPDT). A divergence compensation method and surface topography generation model forms a deterministic FIB fabrication approach. It has been used to generate four periods of the required periodic nano-grating structures (with a minimal dimension of 150 nm) on a normal SCD tool tip and achieves 10 nm form accuracy. The contribution of the beam tail effect has also been evaluated by using the surface topography simulation method. The fabricated diamond tool is then applied to obtain nano-grating on an electroless nickel substrate in a total area of 5 × 2 mm2 through SPDT. The whole SPDT machine process only takes 2 min (with a material removal rate up to 1.8 × 104 μm3 s−1).
Due to the elastic recovery that occurred upon the workpiece material, the practical cutting width is 13 nm smaller than the tool tip. The machining trial shows it is very promising to apply this scale up nanofabrication approach for commercialization of nano-products which possess period nanostructures.