Fabrication of hybrid soft-nanoimprint mold in benign ambient based on thiol-ene

Soft-nanoimprint lithography is a high-throughput and cost-effective lithographic technique with high resolution and low pressure, of which the crucial component is the mold. We demonstrate a method to fabricate hybrid soft-nanoimprint mold in benign ambient based on UV-curable thiol-ene polymer. Because of the special photopolymerization mechanism via "click chemistry", thiol-ene can be cured completely at ambient conditions without inhabitation from oxygen or moisture. The mold can be fabricated in air not in vacuum or a nitrogen atmosphere to simplify the fabrication process and lower the cost. Based on this method, we fabricated a soft-nanoimprint hybrid mold in benign ambient, which is composed of rigid thiol-ene features with sub-60 nm resolution on an elastic poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) substrate. (C) 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.