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William P. King

Kritzer Faculty Scholar

Associate Professor

Research Description

One of the obstacles to industrial adoption of micro- and nano-technology is that the materials and processes that can currently be used for the fabrication of micro and nano structures are too expensive. The King group is working to overcome that barrier by adopting their techniques to perform nano-manufacturing in commonly used industrial materials, such as glass, plastic, rubber, ceramic and metal.

His research group develops thermal processing tools that are used for manufacturing, metrology and materials analysis at the micrometer and nanometer scales. These tools and techniques make high-volume production of nanotechnology-based products economically feasible.

One of the tools in Professor King's laboratory is a heatable silicon probe tip that is about 10 nm in size. The heated tip can be used like the world's smallest soldering iron, in a technique known as thermal dip pen nanolithography. The tips can write nanometer-scale patterns directly onto a variety of surfaces. In another application, he has used the heated probes to grow carbon nanotubes and to study their growth under different conditions. Because the probes can be heated and cooled more rapidly than traditional furnaces, they can produce nanostructures hundreds of times faster than traditional processing techniques. In a completely different application, he has used the heated probes to perform measurements of glass transition with 100 nm resolution. This is a major improvement over previous commercially available tools that could achieve resolution near 10 micrometers. The hundredfold resolution improvement makes this technique useful to nanotechnologists who are developing new pharmaceuticals and polymer composites.

The thermal processing techniques developed in the King group are useful for a wide variety of micro- and nano-manufacturing applications that are scalable to industrially relevant applications and materials. These applications include nano-manufacturing of tissue scaffolds for biotechnology, nano-fabrication of ultrahydrophobic water-repellant surfaces, and incorporation of aligned carbon nanotubes into flexible plastic sheets.