Description
Prof. Gennady Shvets, Center for Accelerator & Particle Physics, Illinois Institute of Technology, explains that the wave nature of light places a fundamental resolution limit on optical lithography; features and objects much smaller than the wavelength of light are hard to produce and image. He describes a new technique, Phonon Enhanced Near-Field Lithography in Infrared (PENFIL), that utilizes thin films of polaritonic materials (such as SiC, ZnSe, GaP) to dramatically enhance the near-field resolution. Enhancement is realized through resonant coupling to the surface phonon polaritons which exist near the material/vacuum interface. Other applications, such as making miniature accelerators and fabricating left-handed materials, are also described.