Application of simple mechanical polishing to fabrication of nanogap flat electrodes

We fabricated nanogap flat electrodes with smooth boundaries between metal electrodes and an insulating substrate for the purpose of evaluating the electrical transport properties of a single molecule and molecular assemblies. We proposed a simple fabricating procedure that combined a lift-off process containing electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching with a mechanical grinding process. The fabrication of flat electrodes with a 200 nm gap, whose step is less than similar to 1 nm, has been demonstrated using this procedure.