Patterning by etching at the nanoscale
Overview
 
Patterning by Etching at the nanoscale (PENs) is a soft lithographic
Soft lithography
200px|right|thumb|Figure 1 - "Inking" a stamp. PDMS stamp with pattern is placed in Ethanol and ODT solution200px|right|thumb|Figure 2 - ODT from the solution settles down onto the PDMS stamp. Stamp now has ODT attached to it which acts as the ink....

 technique in which the bonds in the PDMS
PDMS
PDMS may refer to:* Palm Desert Middle School, a middle school in Palm Desert, California* Parliamentary Document Management System, a system used by several government departments in Australia for workflow/document management...

 matrix are broken to controlably etch PDMS (ie dissolve) at a slow rate along the outside of a PDMS channel formed with a patterned PDMS stamp
PDMS stamp
PDMS stamps are pieces of Polydimethylsiloxane that have been patterned usually against a master to form a relief pattern used in soft lithography...

 applied to a surface. The channel in the stamp can be enlarged in the order of tens of nanometers to several micrometre
Micrometre
A micrometer , is by definition 1×10-6 of a meter .In plain English, it means one-millionth of a meter . Its unit symbol in the International System of Units is μm...

s. Exposing a fresh area of a surface that can be reacted with.
PDMS contains polymer chains of silicon-oxygen bonds, these bonds can be broken by fluoride
Fluoride
Fluoride is the anion F−, the reduced form of fluorine when as an ion and when bonded to another element. Both organofluorine compounds and inorganic fluorine containing compounds are called fluorides. Fluoride, like other halides, is a monovalent ion . Its compounds often have properties that are...

 containing species, in the same way that silicon wafers
Wafer (electronics)
A wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor material, such as a silicon crystal, used in the fabrication of integrated circuits and other microdevices...

 are prepared by etching with hydrofluoric acid
Hydrofluoric acid
Hydrofluoric acid is a solution of hydrogen fluoride in water. It is a valued source of fluorine and is the precursor to numerous pharmaceuticals such as fluoxetine and diverse materials such as PTFE ....

, ammonium fluoride
Ammonium fluoride
Ammonium fluoride is the inorganic compound with the formula NH4F. It crystallizes as small colourless prisms, having a sharp saline taste, and is exceedingly soluble in water.-Crystal structure:...

and related compounds.
Quotations

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as Creationism|creationists and Flat Earth Society|Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that — unless we change the way we live pretty fast — will kill millions.

There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Hurricane Katrina|Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.

My feeling about the war was — given a choice between these two things — obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that — but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer.

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Nagasaki|Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives — and millions may die there.

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

The greatest trick the rich — and their cheerleaders on the right — ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

The lamest defence I could offer — one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear — is that I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up. ... The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster.

We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs.China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many — and the risk is doubled each time.

 
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