Nichole Cates
Smart Material Solutions
Large-Area Nanopatterning with Focused Ion Beam Milling, Nanocoining, and Roll-to-Roll Thermal Embossing
Nichole Cates, Lauren Micklow, Stephen Furst (Smart Material Solutions, Inc.)
Scalable nanopatterning processes are needed for industrial-scale manufacturing of nanotechnologies that have been proven in the lab. Here, we present high-throughput nanopatterning by rapidly replicating and stitching together smallarea patterns to seamlessly nanopattern hundreds of square feet using focused ion beam (FIB) milling, nanocoining, and roll-to-roll (R2R) processes.
About Nichole Cates
Nichole Cates is the Vice President of Research and Development and a Research Scientist at Smart Material Solutions, a startup focusing on scalable nanopatterning. She leads the company’s nanofabrication and nanocharacterization efforts. Prior to joining Smart Material Solutions, Nichole researched quantum-dot solar cells as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain and received an MRS gold medal for her PhD research on organic solar cells at Stanford University. She has also researched topics ranging from batteries to superconductors at Bosch, Bose, NASA, and Ford.
