Researchers at DTU Electro, led by Associate Professor Soren Stobbe, have published their groundbreaking findings in a recent paper titled "Self-assembled photonic cavities with atomic-scale confinement," featured in Nature. Their innovative approach combines two distinct nanotechnology methodologies, bridging the gap between scalability and atomic precision.
Traditionally, the semiconductor industry has focused on the top-down approach, crafting nanostructures from larger silicon blocks. Meanwhile, the bottom-up approach seeks to mimic biological self-assembly processes but often lacks the architecture for external connections. The challenge lay in uniting these two approaches to harness the full potential of nanotechnology.
The DTU Electro team achieved this convergence by exploiting two fundamental surface forces: the Casimir force, responsible for attracting the two silicon halves, and the van der Waals force, which binds them together. These forces stem from quantum fluctuations, allowing the researchers to create photonic cavities with air gaps so minute that their exact size defies measurement, even with advanced transmission electron microscopes. The smallest cavities produced reached a size of just 1-3 silicon atoms.
Ali Nawaz Babar, a PhD student at the NanoPhoton Center of Excellence at DTU Electro and the paper's first author, emphasized the extreme precision required in this process. Even in one of the world's finest university cleanrooms, structural imperfections typically exist on the scale of several nanometers. However, these imperfections become negligible in the context of the self-assembly, as the two halves only meet and touch at the three largest defects.
While self-assembly enables the creation of tiny structures with remarkable properties, it currently lacks the means to connect these structures to the outside world. To address this challenge, conventional semiconductor technology is still necessary for building wires or waveguides that facilitate external connections.
What sets this research apart is the integration of atomic-scale dimensions achieved through self-assembly with the scalability of conventional semiconductor fabrication methods. This fusion enables the creation of circuits on the atomic scale, already integrated into macroscopic circuits, a significant step toward realizing the full potential of nanotechnology.
Associate Professor Soren Stobbe expressed his excitement about this new research direction, highlighting the considerable work that lies ahead. While the journey toward true hierarchical self-assembly in electronics is still in its early stages, the team's achievement marks a critical milestone in the evolution of nanotechnology.
In summary, the development of self-assembled bowtie resonators at atomic-scale confinement represents a promising advancement in the fields of nanotechnology, electronics, quantum technologies, and more. The convergence of two distinct nanotechnology approaches has opened new possibilities for harnessing the unique properties of nanoscale structures within macroscopic circuits, paving the way for future breakthroughs in this field.
Research Report:Self-assembled photonic cavities with atomic-scale confinement
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