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arXiv:quant-ph/0103035 · Physical Review Letters

Two-Photon Diffraction and Quantum Lithography

Milena D’Angelo, Maria V. Chekhova, Yanhua H. Shih

Published Jun 14, 2001• 660 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of quantum lithography. Utilizing the entangled nature of a two-photon state, the experimental results have beaten the classical diffraction limit by a factor of 2. This is a quantum mechanical two-photon phenomenon but not a violation of the uncertainty principle.
DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.87.013602

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The smallest spot in optical lithography and microscopy is generally limited by diffraction. Quantum lithography, which utilizes interference between groups of N entangled photons, was recently proposed to beat the diffraction limit by a factor N. Here we propose a simple method to obtain N photons interference with classical pulses that excite a narrow multiphoton transition, thus shifting the "quantum weight" from the electromagnetic field to the lithographic material. We show how a practical complete lithographic scheme can be developed and demonstrate the underlying principles experimentally by two-photon interference in atomic Rubidium, to obtain focal spots that beat the diffraction limit by a factor of 2.
Classical optical lithography is diffraction limited to writing features of a size lambda/2 or greater, where lambda is the optical wavelength. Using nonclassical photon-number states, entangled N at a time, we show that it is possible to write features of minimum size lambda/(2N) in an N-photon absorbing substrate. This result allows one to write a factor of N2 more elements on a semiconductor chip. A factor of N = 2 can be achieved easily with entangled photon pairs generated from optical parametric down-conversion. It is shown how to write arbitrary 2D patterns by using this method.