Self-assembled photonic cavities with atomic-scale confinement

Ali Nawaz Babar (), Thor August Schimmell Weis, Konstantinos Tsoukalas, Shima Kadkhodazadeh, Guillermo Arregui, Babak Vosoughi Lahijani and Søren Stobbe ()
Additional contact information
Ali Nawaz Babar: Technical University of Denmark
Thor August Schimmell Weis: Technical University of Denmark
Konstantinos Tsoukalas: Technical University of Denmark
Shima Kadkhodazadeh: Technical University of Denmark
Guillermo Arregui: Technical University of Denmark
Babak Vosoughi Lahijani: Technical University of Denmark
Søren Stobbe: Technical University of Denmark

Nature, 2023, vol. 624, issue 7990, 57-63

Abstract: Abstract Despite tremendous progress in research on self-assembled nanotechnological building blocks, such as macromolecules1, nanowires2 and two-dimensional materials3, synthetic self-assembly methods that bridge the nanoscopic to macroscopic dimensions remain unscalable and inferior to biological self-assembly. By contrast, planar semiconductor technology has had an immense technological impact, owing to its inherent scalability, yet it seems unable to reach the atomic dimensions enabled by self-assembly. Here, we use surface forces, including Casimir–van der Waals interactions4, to deterministically self-assemble and self-align suspended silicon nanostructures with void features well below the length scales possible with conventional lithography and etching5, despite using only conventional lithography and etching. The method is remarkably robust and the threshold for self-assembly depends monotonically on all the governing parameters across thousands of measured devices. We illustrate the potential of these concepts by fabricating nanostructures that are impossible to make with any other known method: waveguide-coupled high-Q silicon photonic cavities6,7 that confine telecom photons to 2 nm air gaps with an aspect ratio of 100, corresponding to mode volumes more than 100 times below the diffraction limit. Scanning transmission electron microscopy measurements confirm the ability to build devices with sub-nanometre dimensions. Our work constitutes the first steps towards a new generation of fabrication technology that combines the atomic dimensions enabled by self-assembly with the scalability of planar semiconductors.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06736-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:624:y:2023:i:7990:d:10.1038_s41586-023-06736-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06736-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().