Electric Field-Assisted Atomic Force Microscope-Based Nanopatterning of PEDOT: PSS Nanodomes

Abstract

Nanostructured conductive polymers exhibit unique properties over their bulk forms, but the high-resolution nanofabrication process remains challenging. We first experimentally demonstrate a fabrication technique for nanodome fabrication on PEDOT: PSS using an electric field-assisted atomic force microscopy (E-AFM)-based nanopatterning technique. Furthermore, quantitative models were built between control parameters (dwell time and voltage) and feature dimensions. We pair a compact profile model that represents each feature as a bell-shaped peak with a 3×3 full-factorial design. The geometry dimensions of nanofeatures are characterized by their heights and widths. A first-order bilinear model in standardized dwell time and voltage captures nearly all of the output variability: it explains ∼98% of the variance ($R^2=0.976$) with a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) around 1.63 nm. Voltage exhibits a dominant influence, while dwell time contributes a smaller but still positive effect. Widths are derived by the coefficients of Gaussian and Cauchy profiles using log-scale, yielding $R^2\approx 0.95and0.94$ and RMSE ≈ 10.7 and 11.3 nm, respectively. Across the parameter window, the measured dimensions span heights from 8 to 37 nm and widths from 233 to 380 nm, with round footprints and low background roughness. The overlay figures, parity plots, and block-wise residuals show a voltage-dominated, time-refined regime, in which voltage sets the overall feature size, and the dwell time provides fine-tuning within the selected parameter ranges. This framework delivers shape metric predictions that support rapid recipe tuning, sensitivity assessment, and cross-study comparison. It also provides a compact descriptor set for benchmarking E-AFM-based nanopatterning, not only for PEDOT: PSS, but also potentially for other conductive polymers.