Direct-write gold and silicon ablation on a 100-nm scale

Summary form only given. The current trend in microelectronics fabrication is to reduce the number of processing steps. Laser-assisted etching and laser ablation are attractive because they do not require complicated lithographic surface preparation. However, the resolution of these laser-based techniques is limited by diffraction and, in fact, is never below the micrometer range. In the present paper we report the implementation of a near-field scanning optical/shear force microscopy technique for high-resolution surface ablation.