In the forefront of nanotechnology development, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has acquired one of the world’s finest electron beam lithography systems, one that will allow researchers to work on the sub-molecular scale.

For NASA, this means breakthroughs in miniaturization that could lead to significant reductions in mass and cost of spacecraft to look for traces of life on distant planets. For researchers, it means access to one of only three such systems in the world, and the only one in the public sector devoted to pure research for building the nano-scale devices of the future.

“We want to let researchers from universities, private industry and other government institutions know that we now have this capability and that it is available for their use,” said Dr. Barbara Wilson, chief technologist for JPL.

Operated in the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL, the E- Beam lithography system provides a tool for delving into the realm of nanotechnology, where individual molecules become accessible to electronic probing.

“The E-Beam lithography system will allow researchers to work at the equivalent level of nature’s biological building blocks, by allowing them to create and research technologies at the cellular and sub-cellular level,” said Dr. Paul Maker, manager of the Electron Beam Lithography Laboratory at JPL. Lithography is the process of printing a pattern onto a surface, such as a silicon chip or a high-resolution film.

“The E-Beam lithography system is like a very fast, very high-resolution camera, but instead of exposing photo- sensitive film to light, a thin layer of electron-sensitive material is exposed to electrons,” said Maker. “Instead of using a shutter that imprints the whole image at once, an intense electron beam focused to a tiny spot is rastered over the chip like the beam that creates the image on a television screen.” Just as with photographic film, subsequent processing steps develop the image that was imprinted on the film, in this case the device structure.