High-throughput fabrication of large-scale metasurfaces using electron-beam lithography with SU-8 gratings for multilevel security printing

Abstract

The field of metasurface research has rapidly developed in the past decade. Electron-beam lithography (EBL) is an excellent tool used for rapid prototyping of metasurfaces. However, Gaussian-beam EBL generally struggles with low throughput. In conjunction with the recent rise of interest in metasurfaces made of low-index dielectric materials, we propose in this study the use of a relatively unexplored chemically amplified resist, SU-8 with EBL, as a method for rapid prototyping of low-index metasurfaces. We demonstrate the use of SU-8 grating on silicon for cost-efficient fabrication of an all-dielectric multilevel security print for anti-counterfeiting purposes, which encrypt different optical information with different light illumination conditions, namely, bright-field reflection, dark-field reflection, and cross-polarized reflection. The large-scale print (1  mm2) could be exposed in a relatively short time (∼11  min) due to the ultrahigh sensitivity of the resist, while the feature size of ∼200  nm was maintained, demonstrating that SU-8 EBL resist serves as a good candidate for rapid prototyping of metasurface designs. Our results could find applications in the general area of increasing EBL patterning speed for a variety of other devices and structures.