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Quantum Interferometric Optical Lithography: Exploiting Entanglement to Beat The Diffraction Limit

Agedi N. Boto·Pieter Kok·Daniel S. Abrams·Samuel L. Braunstein·Colin P. Williams·Jonathan P. Dowling
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Abstract

Classical, interferometric, optical lithography is diffraction limited to writing features of a size lambda/2 or greater, where lambda is the optical wavelength. Using nonclassical photon number states, entangled N at a time, we show that it is possible to write features of minimum size lambda/(2N) in an N-photon absorbing substrate. This result surpasses the usual classical diffraction limit by a factor of N. Since the number of features that can be etched on a two-dimensional surface scales inversely as the square of the feature size, this allows one to write a factor of N^2 more elements on a semiconductor chip. A factor of N = 2 can be achieved easily with entangled photon pairs generated from optical parametric downconversion. It is shown how to write arbitrary 2D patterns by using this method.

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Agedi N. Boto, Pieter Kok, Daniel S. Abrams, Samuel L. Braunstein, Colin P. Williams, Jonathan P. Dowling. 2000-05-04. Quantum Interferometric Optical Lithography: Exploiting Entanglement to Beat The Diffraction Limit. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.85.2733

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