Nanostructure fabrication by reactive-ion etching of laser-focused chromium on silicon

We have fabricated chromium nanostructures on silicon by laser-focused atomic deposition and have further processed these structures by reactive-ion etching in an SF6 plasma. We show that the result can be an array of parallel wires as narrow as 68 nm or an array of parallel Si trenches as narrow as 85 nm. The laser-focused deposition process is inherently parallel, so a large area is patterned simultaneously with an accurate periodicity of 212.78 nm. This method represents a novel way to make large, coherent arrays of sub-100 nm-size structures.