[[extropy-chat] diffraction limit

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sat, 29 May 2004, Dan Clemmensen wrote:

> I think the E-beam
> diffraction limit is small enough for atomic precision?

I would suspect that to be the case but at the atomic level you
have much greater problems such as the purity of the bulk materials
involved.

> The industry tried to go from
> 193nm to 153nm, but this required CaF lenses, and these lenses turned
> out to be impossible to build in production quantities.

Dan, Eric D. points out in Table 6.2 in Nanosystems that UV-C is from 280
to 200 nm.  193 and 153nm are below this scale.  The energy of even UV-C
radiation exceeds the many common bond dissociation energies (Table 3.8).
Has anything you have read commented on the lifetime of the lenses due
to the high flux of bond-breaking photons?

Also, there was a lot of talk 3-5 years ago about the efforts to produce
even shorter wavelength beams (effectively X-rays) and there were several
reports if I recall correctly of capabilities of producing feature sizes
as small as 10nm.  But I haven't heard anything about these recently.
Do you know if these methods are still being worked on?

Thanks,
Robert