I was seeing this great project from the 22 Con and I was wondering if it would be possible to manufacture the necessary optic gridding using the block stage instead of photolitography.
What do you think?
As I understand it, if the block stage enables sub-micron positioning and the grid needs to have around 50microns, it should be possible (provided one could make some kind of micrometer sized tip) - but I don’t know!
I’m just wondering because the SIM proposal seems interesting and Photolitography is outside my range, but the block stage isnt.
Hi @mzedp that kind of thing would be physically possible I think. Optical gratings with pitch of 1um are often ruled mechanically, but I don’t know what kind of scribe that uses.
I don’t have a clear knowledge of what is required of a mask for structured illumination, I would imagine that you need good contrast and low scattering, which might be very difficult with scribing. A common method of making small patterns is film photography. If you photograph a piece of paper with black-and-white lines printed on then the negative gives a reduced version. 50um should be within the limit of that kind of method. Now that film cameras are less common, there are people that will make a film transparency or negative from a digital file on small grain Ilford film. For example a quick search turned up this in the UK 35mm black & white negatives from digital photos – Digital Slides. They say ~2500 pixel files in teh narrow dimension, which on the ~25mm negative size is 10um, so 50um might be OK. As it is digital then it is probably necessary to make the pitch an exact number of pixels to avoid aliasing.