CHARACTERIZATION OF MAGNETIC NANOSTRUCTURES CREATED BY STEPWISE NANOSPHERE LITHOGRAPHY

Abstract

There has been increasing interest recently in understanding the magnetic behavior of complex magnetic nanostructures for different fields of magnetism such as magnonics and artificial spin ice system studies. However, most studies have been limited to simple two-dimensional magnetic systems due to the fabrication challenges. The current nanofabrication techniques such as e-beam lithography technique, nanoimprint and EVU lithography are greatly restricted by process related limitations including the stringent alignment requirement at nanoscales, complex fabrication procedures, high-cost and long operation time. This motivates us to develop a new nanofabrication technique called stepwise nanosphere lithography which can overcome such fabrication challenges. In this thesis, the newly developed stepwise nanosphere lithography is reported and novel magnetic nanostructures such as nanotriangle matrices, 3D nanowire-antidots and 3D nanorectangle-antidots are fabricated using this technique and their new magnetic behaviors are studied.