Pyro-EHD Lithography, Fabrication and Employment of 3D Microstructures

The capacity of soft materials to self-organize into regular patterns has been long recognized1-3 and a lot of the existing procedures identify the precedence of nature, which uses the same parsimonious principles to make elaborate micropatterns such as exoskeletons4 and photonic crystals5,6. Not all of the rich patterns generated spontaneously by physical forces are long-lived, however, which may limit opportunities for exploiting them in technologies. Fluids are particularly apt to display transient patterned instabilities that are gone in an instant. A wide variety of lithographic techniques have been developed for fabricating complex three-dimensional (3D) structures7-9 starting from a fluid polymer, such as soft lithography10 or capillary-force lithography11. In the first case soft lithography allows one to develop lab-on-chip devices with applications ranging from organic light emitting diode to biology and biochemistry12 while capillary-force lithography is able to nicely pattern polymers at nano-/microscale, but with a very low aspect ratio, in a single step and avoiding the use of external forces.