title: Facile Transferring of Wafer-Scale Ultrathin Alumina Membranes onto Substrates for Nanostructure Patterning.
abstract: Ordered nanostructure arrays have attracted intensive attention because of their various applications. However, it is still a great challenge to achieve ordered nanostructure patterning over a large area (such as wafer-scale) by a technique that allows high throughput, large pattern area and low equipment costs. Here, through a unique design of the fabrication and transferring processes, we achieve a facile transferring of wafer-scale ultrathin alumina membranes (UTAMs) onto substrates without any twisting, folding, cracking and contamination. The most important in our method is fixing the UTAM onto the wafer-scale substrate before removing the backside Al and alumina barrier layer. It is also demonstrated that the thickness and surface smoothing of UTAMs play crucial roles in this transferring process. By using these perfectly transferred UTAMs as masks, various nanostructure patterning including nanoparticle, nanopore (nanomesh) and nanowire arrays are fabricated on wafer-scale substrates with tunable and uniform dimension. Because there are no requirements for UTAMs, substrates and materials to be deposited, the method presented here shall provide a cost-effective platform for the fabrication of ordered nanostructures on large substrates for various applications in nanotechnology.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.|Department of Physics, College of Science, University of Al-Mustansiryah , Baghdad, Iraq.
authors.forename: Ahmed
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Al-Haddad
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.
authors.forename: Zhibing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhan
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.
authors.forename: Chengliang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.|Department of Physics, College of Science, University of Al-Mustansiryah , Baghdad, Iraq.
authors.forename: Samar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tarish
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.
authors.forename: Ranjith
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vellacheria
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics & IMN MacroNano (ZIK), Ilmenau University of Technology , Professor Schmidt Strasse 26, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany.
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lei
keywords: nanostructure arrays; ultrathin alumina membranes; wafer scale