“Crack-photolithography” for high-throughput nanopatterning and nanofluidic applications

We present an innovative cracking-assisted nanofabrication technique that relies only on a standard photolithography (photoresist patterning) process. This novel technique produces arbitrary-shaped nanopatterns with well-controlled, various geometric dimensions in a large-area and high-throughput manner. In addition, we show that mixed-scale patterns fabricated using the technique can be used as a master mold for replicating numerous nanofluidic devices via soft lithography, which to the best of our knowledge has not been reported previously in material-failure-based techniques including cracking.