Ultrafast and low temperature laser annealing for crystalline TiO ₂ nanostructures patterned by electro-hydrodynamic lithography

Direct patterning of inorganic materials based on electro-hydrodynamic lithography (EHL) has attracted tremendous attentions as next generation soft-lithography technologies owing to its simple and cost-effective process. We show that the EHL technique based nanoscale inorganic pattern transfer coupled with ultrafast laser annealing is suitable for obtaining nanostructured TiO ₂ over a large area with great fidelity. The laser annealing technique enables us to overcome a technical issue of EHL associated with long processing time and high annealing temperature. We further demonstrated the enhanced switching performance by using the laser annealed TiO₂ layer as an electron transport layer in the electro-chromic device.