My first real venture in research took place in the summer of 2008. I was pretty lucky to get a summer research internship with this lab, since everyone in the lab turned out really cool, friendly, and funny. It made research all the more fun. It was also pretty sweet because Northwestern is pretty darn good at nanotechnology, and here I was, doing nanotechnology research.
So my project was to develop and optimize a process for depositing an orderly microsphere monolayer onto photoresist. This is useful because you can then process the photoresist/microsphere combo and create an orderly array of nano-pillars or nano-wells in photoresist. Basically, make shapes out of photoresist that are real small. The process in question was developed previously at our lab, and basically used microspheres to focus UV light subwavelength, which can expose really small areas of photoresist, and ultimately, lead to real small structures. You can read more about it here. Making these small pillars are useful because of their applications in fuel cells, solar cells, and batteries. Normally, these shapes are made with focused ion beams that a machine has to manually punch, which takes forever since each structure is on the order for nanometers, and the goal is cover a large surface area. Plus, it gets pretty expensive since not everyone has a focused ion beam machine.
So my job was to get as many of these microspheres to stick nicely onto the photoresist as possible, which is tricky, because microspheres are hydrophilic and photoresist is hydrophobic. So the first part of my research was to test different surfactants in order to overcome this disagreement. After this problem, the next step was to vary and control different physical properties, such as how fast I was depositing, or what concentration to use. After a nice monolayer was finally formed, the last hurdle was to develop the microspheres and photoresist into nice pillars that were taller than they were wide. After my research, I was able to present at Argonne’s Research Symposium for Undergraduates in Science, which I highly recommend students to apply for, since it is a great opportunity to share your work and hear about what others are up to in your field.
