Abstract
This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental study on the formation of nano-scale patterns on gold thin film by using nanoimprint technique. The aim is to study the effect of different manufacturing environments, temperature and pressure holding time, on the formation of metal patterns. This thesis is mainly divided into two parts. The first part employs molecular dynamics simulation method for the theoretical study to observe the nanoimprint process by changing its simulation temperature and holding time. The simulation results can not only be used for examining the mechanics in the forming process but also be taken as a reference of nanoimprint experiment. The second part is nanoimprint experiment. This research uses silicon mold and gold thin film to conduct the experiment. Different parameters, temperature and holding time, are designed to find the optimum experimental environment for nanoimprint process. From the results of molecular dynamics simulation and nanoimprint experiment, one can find that if the temperature is higher or the holding time is longer, the pattern formation will be wider or deeper. The results illustrate that the experimental environment can be assigned to be 1000C in temperature and 4 minutes in holding time in order to obtain good quality of pattern transfer of the mold.