(Invited) Nanofab Lab . . . in a Box!™ for Teaching and Outreach

Creating patterned nanowires or highly ordered nanostructures is normally a difficult and expensive project that requires use of a multimillion dollar clean room, expensive tools such as an electron beam lithography tool and highly trained technical team to use and maintain the instruments and laboratory. Once the first copy is made, traditional lithographic patterns need to be reproduced starting from bare wafers. Each and every copy of the nanowire circuits requires new wafers, many hours of patterning, photoresist developing, vacuum deposition and selective removal of materials. Once made, characterizing the product requires additional specialized equipment and skills. For all the work involved, there are no short cuts. The full complexity for making patterned nanowires delays hands on nanotechnology until graduate level classes for most students.

The undergraduate research group at University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point has introduced a practical alternative to these techniques for a wide variety of materials (metals, alloys, semiconductors and conductive polymers). Electroplate and Lift Lithography simplifies making patterned nanowires to two steps: electroplate the material on an ultrananocrystalline diamond template and lift the resulting structures away using Scotch tape. Making duplicate copies is accomplished in minutes by repeating the process on the non-sacrificial template. By growing wires for a longer duration, the patterned wires can be characterized with a simple USB powered microscope. The lack of expensive consumables or capital equipment makes this accessible to students even in rural, inner-city or tribal school districts.

As a STEM outreach activity, this provides some extraordinary opportunities for students and provides a pathway for high school students to make novel microwire/nanowire research contributions while they are still in high school. A volunteer from the audience will make nanowires and microwires in a live demonstration of the technique.

Warning for general high school and undergraduate audiences: After making wires, participants are not allowed to claim “I am no good at science” because you will have performed cutting-edge science. The amazing proof will be the wires that you may keep to show your friends!