ABSTRACT Achieving low‐cost patterning of 10 nm‐scale nanostructures remains a critical challenge in nanofabrication. Conventional electron beam lithography has a prolonged processing time and limited throughput due to its intrinsic small‐area processing nature. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography faces prohibitive costs in equipment and materials. While industrial nanoimprinting offers a lower‐cost, high‐throughput alternative, its resolution is fundamentally constrained by the template's minimum feature size. Herein, we present a new nanofabrication process that exploits the redeposition effect in ion milling to fabricate controllable 10 nm‐scale nanogaps. This approach enabled the preparation of gratings and nanorings array integrated with noble metal nanogaps for applications in surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Furthermore, gratings and nanopillar arrays with sidewalls coated by a metal mask were dry‐etched to form a self‐aligned stacked nanomorphology on a silicon substrate without optical alignment, inheriting the metal mask's minimum feature size. The resulting high‐quality templates subsequently facilitated high‐fidelity replication of diminutive structures via nanoimprint lithography (NIL). This scalable strategy holds significant potential as a feasible route for manufacturing applications in nanophononics, biosensing, quantum devices, integrated circuits (ICs), and beyond.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.