Recently, plasmonic nanolithography is studied by many researchers (1, 2 and 3). This presented a low-cost and high-throughput approach to maskless nanolithography technique that uses a metallic sharp-ridge nanoaperture with a high strong nanometer-sized optical spot induced by surface plasmon resonance. However, these nanometer-scale spots generated by metallic nanoapertures are formed in only the near-field region, which makes it very difficult to pattern above the photoresist surface at high-speeds.
Development of high-throughput, polarization-maintaining, near-field probes