Fundamentals of embossing nanoimprint lithography in polymer substrates.

The convergence of micro-/nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) and biomedical industries is creating a need for innovation and discovery around materials, particularly in miniaturized systems that use polymers as the primary substrate. Polymers are ubiquitous in the microelectronics industry and are used as sensing materials, lithography tools, replication molds, microfluidics, nanofluidics, and biomedical devices. This diverse set of operational requirements dictates that the materials employed must possess different properties in order to reduce the cost of production, decrease the scale of devices to the appropriate degree, and generate engineered devices with new functional properties at cost-competitive levels of production. Nanoscale control of polymer deformation at a massive scale would enable breakthroughs in all of the aforementioned applications, but is currently beyond the current capabilities of mass manufacturing. This project was focused on developing a fundamental understanding of how polymers behave under different loads and environments at the nanoscale in terms of performance and fidelity in order to fill the most critical gaps in our current knowledgebase on this topic