Hybrid materials: a bottom-up approach for nanotechnology applications

Engineered organic-inorganic hybrid materials, HyMat, offer new opportunities for the easy, fast and cheap development of miniaturized functional devices. The integration of inorganic oxide networks, organic functional groups and optically active molecules or nanoparticles allows to obtain combinations of properties and structures otherwise impossible with traditional materials. In particular, a simple and highly versatile synthesis platform enabling preparation of HyMat is presented, which is built up by a bottom-up sol-gel approach at low processing temperatures. A few types of key building blocks pave the way for accessing HyMat and make up their formulation, providing a means to synthesize innovative materials enabling to get: - optically active micro and nanostructures; - miniaturized sensors for analytes in gaseous or liquid media; - direct patternability with a range of lithographic techniques; - variable inorganic and organic compositions, and controlled porosity. Examples of micro and nanostructures based on these spin-on materials with ceramic (i.e. SiO2, GeO2, Al2O3, ZrO2, TiO2,) and hybrid compositions will be presented for different applications including plasmonic or fluorescent sensors, dry-etching masks with outstanding resistance, optically active micro and nanostructured platforms and high resolution patterns.