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Patterning by controlled cracking

Nature volume 485, pages 221–224 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Crack formation drives material failure and is often regarded as a process to be avoided1,2,3. However, closer examination of cracking phenomena has revealed exquisitely intricate patterns such as spirals4, oscillating5,6,7 and branched7 fracture paths and fractal geometries8. Here we demonstrate the controlled initiation, propagation and termination of a variety of channelled crack patterns in a film/substrate system9,10,11 comprising a silicon nitride thin film deposited on a silicon substrate using low-pressure chemical vapour deposition. Micro-notches etched into the silicon substrate concentrated stress for crack initiation, which occurred spontaneously during deposition of the silicon nitride layer. We reproducibly created three distinct crack morphologies—straight, oscillatory and orderly bifurcated (stitchlike)—through careful selection of processing conditions and parameters. We induced direction changes by changing the system parameters, and we terminated propagation at pre-formed multi-step crack stops. We believe that our patterning technique presents new opportunities in nanofabrication and offers a starting point for atomic-scale pattern formation12, which would be difficult even with current state-of-the-art nanofabrication methodologies.

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Figure 1: Crack control.
Figure 2: Formation mechanism of an oscillating crack.
Figure 3: Crack refraction.
Figure 4: Crack termination.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Creative Research Initiatives (Research Center of MEMS Space Telescope) of MEST/NRF. We thank Y.Y. Earmme at KAIST for discussions and J. Yeo, Y. D. Suh, S. Hong, P. Lee, Y. Rho and J.-A. Jeon for technical assistance with fabrications and experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Research Center of MEMS Space Telescope, Ewha Womans University, Daehyun-dong 11-1, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-750, South Korea,

    Koo Hyun Nam & Il H. Park

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Applied Nano Technology and Science Lab, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 335 Daehak-ro, Yusong-Gu, Daejeon 305-701, South Korea,

    Seung Hwan Ko

Authors
  1. Koo Hyun Nam
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  2. Il H. Park
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Contributions

K.H.N. conceived the study, discovered the control of cracking using microfabrication, conducted experiments and theoretical study of the phenomena, and invented DISL. K.H.N. and I.H.P. designed mask patterns for photolithography and fabricated samples. S.H.K. did the post-processing and conducted experiments. K.H.N. and S.H.K. wrote the paper and discussed the results. All authors commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Koo Hyun Nam or Seung Hwan Ko.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Discussions 1-10, Supplementary Figures 1-11 and Supplementary References. (PDF 1294 kb)

Supplementary Movie

This Supplementary Movie file shows a video clip of wafer size long oscillation. (MOV 5508 kb)

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Nam, K., Park, I. & Ko, S. Patterning by controlled cracking. Nature 485, 221–224 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11002

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