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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Quantum lithography beyond the diffraction limit via Rabi-oscillations

Zeyang Liao, M. Al-Amri, Muhammad Suhail Zubairy

Published Mar 24, 2011• 0 citations
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Abstract

We propose a quantum optical method to do the subwavelength lithography. Our method is similar to the traditional lithography but adding a critical step before dissociating the chemical bound of the photoresist. The subwavelength pattern is achieved by inducing the multi-Rabi oscillation between the two atomic levels. The proposed method does not require multiphoton absorption and the entanglement of photons. It is expected to be realizable using current technology.

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We propose a quantum optical method to do the subwavelength lithography. Our method is similar to the traditional lithography but adding a critical step before dissociating the chemical bound of the photoresist. The subwavelength pattern is achieved by inducing the multi-Rabi oscillation between the two atomic levels. The proposed method does not require multiphoton absorption and the entanglement of photons. It is expected to be realizable using current technology.
A novel approach for the generation of subwavelength structures in interferometric optical lithography is described. Our scheme relies on the preparation of the system in a position dependent trapping state via phase shifted standing wave patterns. Since this process only comprises resonant atom-field interactions, a multiphoton absorption medium is not required. The contrast of the induced pattern does only depend on the ratios of the applied field strengths such that our method in principle works at very low laser intensities.
The resolutions of the optical lithography is limited by the well-known Rayleigh limit. Although the atom lithography can generate features smaller than this limit, the spacing of the pattern is still limited by the optical wavelength. Here, we proposed two atom lithography methods, both of which used the coherent Rabi oscillation to break the diffraction limit. One is in the microwave regime where the Rydberg atom is used and micrometer resolution can be achieved. The other is in the optical regime where sub-10 nanometer resolution is possible.
The resolution of optical lithography and the spacing of atom lithography are limited by about half of the wavelength due to the Rayleigh limit. Here we propose a coherent atom lithography experiment which can print nanometer structures. In this proposal, we show that subwavelength spatial distribution of the atoms in the excited state can be achieved by inducing spatially modulated Rabi oscillations in two-level atoms. We use the internal energy of the atoms to excite the photoresist and it can then print the subwavelength structure into the photoresist. For the peak Rabi frequency of about 2 GHz and the recoil limited collimation, we show that sub-10-nm10\text{-nm}10-nm spacing in both one- and two-dimensional space is possible.
The concept of performing quantum lithography with classical, instead of entangled, light is of great interest for practical implementation. One recent proposal [Hemmer, Muthukrishnan, Scully, and Zubairy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 163603 (2006)] to accomplish this was based on the use of frequency selective multiphoton transitions in a two-level atom. To analyze this possibility we investigate a four-level system theoretically and show that a high-resolution lithography is possible. We quantitatively identify conditions under which high-contrast lithography can be performed without sacrificing high resolution. The approach is a perturbative density matrix method. This model identifies the tradeoff between resolution and contrast as being due to higher-order terms from intermediate-level Rabi oscillations. We propose using positive and negative one-photon detunings to suppress this effect. Allowing higher Rabi frequencies means that shorter interaction time can be used, and this overcomes the degradation in contrast due to population decay. Finally, we generalize our scheme to $\mathbit{N}$-photon lithography.