Are you interested in simultaneously unraveling the fundamentals of wear and contributing to the solution of friction-related challenges in computer chip production?
At the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography, we work with ASML on new processes to fabricate the electronic chips that power nearly every sector in the world. These chips are fabricated onto silicon wafers. During fabrication, nanometre scale relative displacements between the silicon wafer and the wafer positioner lead to unpredictable friction forces and wear which in turn cause in-plane deformations in the wafer, limiting the achievable feature size in chips.
While enormous progress has been made in fundamentally understanding wear, it remains striking that the most widely applied wear law (Archard’s law) is empirical and includes a proportionality constant that lacks a clear physical meaning but can vary over many orders of magnitude. Increasing evidence suggests that stiff and wear resistant materials, i.e. ceramics or diamond, undergo tribochemical, atomistic wear in which passivating species in the environment may play a crucial role. In this project, you will perform wear experiments on a recently developed instrument that enables customized wear experiments in controllable environment. The goal of the project is to provide insight into the industrially relevant wear behavior, leading to control over the wear behavior and its impact on positioning accuracy in nanolithography.