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Abstract Nanostructured anti‐reflection metasurfaces for infrared lenses are designed for imaging in harsh environments such as dust (e.g., moon or battlefield), micrometeorites (e.g., Lagrange points), and high‐radiation fluctuations (e.g., Mars) with limited lifetimes. These multifunctional optical meta‐surfaces (MOMS) simultaneously deliver high thermal stability and anti‐fouling behavior due to their monolithic nature (e.g., no mismatch in the coefficient of thermal expansion), hydrophobicity, and low dust adherence. However, the incompatibility of inorganic semiconductor micromachining with non‐planar substrates has limited MOMS to polymeric and glass lenses. Here, a new method of conformal electrochemical nanoimprinting is presented to directly micromachine a nature‐inspired MOMS onto a silicon lens. Uniquely, stretchablegold‐coated patterned porous PVDF stamps are made by lithographically templated thermally induced phase separation (lt‐TIPS), which simultaneously embeds it with (i) interconnected porosity for promoting mass transport, (ii) HF‐resistance for increasing operational lifetime, and (iii) stretchable electronic nanocoatings (i.e., Au) that can catalyze the electrochemical process. In a demonstration of its hierarchical micromachining capability, a sharklet microscale pattern is successfully transferred to a silicon lens with anti‐reflective and hydrophobic properties. This work paves the way for MOMS’ extension onto inorganic semiconductors and IR lenses.more » « less
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Abstract Metal‐assisted electrochemical nanoimprinting (Mac‐Imprint) scales the fabrication of micro‐ and nanoscale 3D freeform geometries in silicon and holds the promise to enable novel chip‐scale optics operating at the near‐infrared spectrum. However, Mac‐Imprint of silicon concomitantly generates mesoscale roughness (e.g., protrusion size ≈45 nm) creating prohibitive levels of light scattering. This arises from the requirement to coat stamps with nanoporous gold catalyst that, while sustaining etchant diffusion, imprints its pores (e.g., average diameter ≈42 nm) onto silicon. In this work, roughness is reduced to sub‐10 nm levels, which is in par with plasma etching, by decreasing pore size of the catalyst via dealloying in far‐from equilibrium conditions. At this level, single‐digit nanometric details such as grain‐boundary grooves of the catalyst are imprinted and attributed to the resolution limit of Mac‐Imprint, which is argued to be twice the Debye length (i.e., 1.7 nm)—a finding that broadly applies to metal‐assisted chemical etching. Last, Mac‐Imprint is employed to produce single‐mode rib‐waveguides on pre‐patterned silicon‐on‐insulator wafers with root‐mean‐square line‐edge roughness less than 10 nm while providing depth uniformity (i.e., 42.9 ± 5.5 nm), and limited levels of silicon defect formation (e.g., Raman peak shift < 0.1 cm−1) and sidewall scattering.more » « less
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