  A nanopatterning scheme is presented by which the structure height can be
controlled in the tens of nanometers range and the lateral resolution is a
factor at least three times better than the point spread function of the
writing beam. The method relies on the initiation of the polymerization
mediated by a very inefficient energy transfer from a fluorescent dye molecule
after single photon absorption. The mechanism has the following distinctive
steps: the dye adsorbs on the substrate surface with a higher concentration
than in the bulk, upon illumination it triggers the polymerization, then
isolated islands develop and merge into a uniform structure (percolation),
which subsequently grows until the illumination is interrupted. This
percolation mechanism has a threshold that introduces the needed nonlinearity
for the fabrication of structures beyond the diffraction limit.
