Ion-beam sculpting at nanometre length scales

By Jiali Li, D. Stein, C. McMullan, D. Branton, M. Aziz, J. Golovchenko. Nature, 2001

1,448 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Manipulating matter at the nanometre scale is important for many electronic, chemical and biological advances, but present solid-state fabrication methods do not reproducibly achieve dimensional control at the nanometre scale. Here we report a means of fashioning matter at these dimensions that uses low-energy ion beams and reveals surprising atomic transport phenomena that occur in a variety of materials and geometries. The method is implemented in a feedback-controlled sputtering system that provides fine control over ion beam exposure and sample temperature. We call the method “ion-beam sculpting”, and apply it to the problem of fabricating a molecular-scale hole, or nanopore, in a thin insulating solid-state membrane. Such pores can serve to localize molecular-scale electrical junctions and switches and function as masks to create other small-scale structures. Nanopores also function as membrane channels in all living systems, where they serve as extremely sensitive electro-mechanical devices that regulate electric potential, ionic flow, and molecular transport across cellular membranes. We show that ion-beam sculpting can be used to fashion an analogous solid-state device: a robust electronic detector consisting of a single nanopore in a Si3N4 membrane, capable of registering single DNA molecules in aqueous solution.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39cd58e11156072cf099193eef130b3c8f6ab9fc

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Citations in the corpus

Rapid electronic detection of probe-specific microRNAs using thin nanopore sensors. (2010, methodology): “Advances in nanopore fabrication in silicon nitride (SiN) membranes using io”
DNA molecules and configurations in a solid-state nanopore microscope (2003, background): “These difficulties may be overcome with the use of a suitable solid-state nanopor”
Nanopore sensors for nucleic acid analysis. (2011, background): “The first reports of DNA sensing using solid-state nanopores emerged in early 2001 when Golovchenko and co-workers used a custom-built ion-beam sculpting tool with feedback control to make nanopores with well-defined sizes in thin SiN membrane”
Colloquium: Physical approaches to DNA sequencing and detection (2007, methodology): “The general concept is to look at the pore as a continuum large dielectric (water) region of space surrounded by a material of low dielectric (SiO2,Si3N4), thus creating an electrostatically quasi-one-dimensional structure (Teber, 2005; Zhang et al., 2005).”