Optical Microtechnology

CSIRO MIT

3.30pm, Friday 1 October 2004, AR103 Seminar Room, Graduate Research Centre

Microtechnology plays an important role in modern optical systems. Apart from obvious applications in fabricating semiconductor-based optical devices, such as laser diodes and detectors, microtechnology is used extensively to create diffractive structures, micro-mirror arrays, micro-lens arrays, photonic crystals and many more components. At CSIRO we have developed a range of diffractive and reflective optical structures with applications in security print, such as anti-counterfeiting measures for bank notes. The heart of our capability is an electron beam lithography system which uses a finely focussed beam of electrons to expose electron sensitive resins to create patterns. This is the only commercial grade system operating in Australia and is capable of writing patterns with a resolution of about 100 nm over areas as large as 100 mm square. Importantly, the system allows us to create structures smaller than the wavelength of light so that we can explore near-field optical effects, such as the generation of surface plasmons by light incident on metals. The use and control of these interactions is known as plasmonics.

In this talk I will describe the electron beam lithography and ultra-violet photolithography technology that we use for creating microstructures and I will talk about the optical applications. Some preliminary results on our recent work on the generation of surface plasmons in subwavelength structures will be presented.

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