Professor Yeon Sik Jung from the KAIST Department of Materials Science and Engineering and his research team have developed a high-resolution nanotransfer printing technology. With the newly developed technology, a long document such as the Tripitaka Koreana (Palman Daejanggyeong), whose pages would cover an entire football field, can be printed on a single piece of A4 paper. The research was published on the online edition of Nature Communications.

The research team developed the technology to print nanostructures 10 nanometers (nm) in width onto virtually any surface. Previous nanotransfer printing technology utilized templates to generate nanostructures, which were then transferred onto the target surfaces such as silicon. However, when the width of the nanostructure was too small – under few hundred nanometers – the nanostructure adhered to the template, hindering the printing process. Printing nanostructures less than 10 nm in width was deemed physically impossible.

The newly developed technology utilizes a new template made out of polymers with a high surface energy. This allows the nanostructures to be transferred without adhering to the template. When required, the surface adhesion of the template can be controlled, allowing the nanostructures to be printed onto biological surfaces such as the human skin and fruit peels. Such control of the surface adhesion was achieved by injecting a solvent from a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) gel pad into the interfaces between the polymer replica and polyimide (PI) film[1].

By utilizing this technology, the research team developed a sensor that detects explosive gases such as hydrogen as well as residual pesticides on the surface of fruits. The team’s next goal is to reduce the detection time – from a few hours down to a few seconds.

Professor Jung said, “The market for nanotransfer printing technology will grow to about 100 trillion KRW in the next 10 years. We expect the technology to be utilized in flexible electronic materials, low-power, high-performance displays, sensors with excellent responsiveness, and highly efficient catalysts.”

[1]Sorry about this part – the article was too short so I used a phrase from the journal article. If necessary, delete the sentence.

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