The integration of additive manufacturing principles with thin film deposition technologies presents significant opportunities for advancing material processing capabilities. While conventional lithography and vapor-phase methods have demonstrated reliable performance, they face fundamental limitations in process flexibility and step reduction. This work explores a novel approach to spatial atomic layer deposition that addresses these constraints. The miniaturization of Spatial Atomic Layer Deposition (SALD) technology introduces specific challenges in gas flow control and precursor delivery. ATLANT 3D presents a micro-nozzle system enabling Direct Atomic Layer Processing (DALP), which achieves localized deposition through precise gas flow confinement within micrometer-scale regions. The system maintains conventional ALD surface chemistry while enabling selective area processing. Initial characterization demonstrates that this approach achieves crystalline thin film formation with quality comparable to conventional ALD methods. The localized nature of the process enables rapid prototyping of materials and processes as well as novel device architectures by reducing the number of required lithography steps. The system demonstrates compatibility with standard ALD precursor chemistries while providing enhanced spatial selectivity.

Experimental validation of this technique has been conducted across several application domains. Temperature sensor fabrication demonstrates sensitivity comparable to conventional methods, while optical applications such as Bragg mirrors exhibit expected reflectivity profiles. The ability to create overlapping depositions enables complex multilayer structures, as evidenced by the formation of ultrathin optical elements. Additional applications in catalysis and microelectronics highlight the versatility of the approach. This work demonstrates the feasibility of miniaturized spatial ALD for selective area processing. The results suggest potential applications in rapid prototyping and novel device architectures, particularly where traditional lithography poses limitations.

The elastic coupling between a magnetic film and the substrate is desired in SAW-FMR devices and in magnetoacoustics [1–3] when one harnesses the interaction between a surface acoustic wave (SAW) hosted by a piezoelectric substrate and the magnetization dynamics of a magnetic film on top. We first designed an experiment specifically meant to quantify the magneto-elastic and magneto-rotation field that arise from the mechanical deformations induced by a SAW. For this we prepared magnetic discs possessing a vortex ground state. The discs can be excited either by a remotely generated SAW or by an inductive antenna placed on top of the disc. The vortex dynamics can be measured by magnetic resonance force microscope (MRFM). The antenna has broadband frequency capability and can induce the gyrotropic dynamics of the vortex. The SAWs can also induce this dynamic, provided that the vortex gyration frequency is resonant with that of the SAW [4]. This ability to excite the same dynamics with a classical antenna or with magneto-acoustic interaction allows to quantify the effective magneto-elastic and magneto-rotation fields. It appears that the symmetry of the magneto-acoustic interactions deserved to be revisited. We did such analysis using micromagnetic simulation and analytical calculations. In addition, the symmetry of the coupling can be conveniently studied when studying the coupling of spin waves (SWs) in synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs) to SAWs [5]. For this we calculated the layer-resolved susceptibility tensor of a SAF, the effective magneto-elastic and magneto-rotation fields associated to a travelling elastic wave, and the power irreversibly transferred by the elastic wave to the magnetic layers. In particular, we showed that in SAF the complementary angular dependencies of the acoustic and optical SW modes makes it possible to excite spin waves for any relative orientation of magnetization and acoustic wavevector.

[1] M. Weiler et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 117601 (2011).
[2] P. Kuszewski et al.  Phys. Rev. Appl. 10, 034036 (2018).
[3] P. Rovillain et al.  Phys. Rev. Appl. 18, 064043 (2022).
[4] R. L. Seeger et al. under review, arXiv:2409.05998.
[5] R. L. Seeger et al.  Phys. Rev. B. 109, 104416 (2024)

- List of authors and affiliations : 
R. L. Seeger(a,b), F. Millo(a), L. La Spina(c), V. Laude(c), A. Bartasyte(c), S. Margueron(c), G. Soares(b) , L. Thevenard(a), C. Gourdon(a), J.-V. Kim(a), C. Chappert(a), A. Solignac(b), G. de Loubens(b), T. Devolder(a)
(a) Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Saclay 91120 Palaiseau, France
(b) SPEC, CEA, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
(c) Univ, de Franche-Comté, CNRS, Institut FEMTO-ST, 26 rue de l’Epitaphe, 25000 Besançon, France
(d) Institut des Nanosciences de Paris, Sorbonne Université,CNRS, UMR 7588, 4 place Jussieu, F-75005 Paris, France

- Bio : Rafael Lopes Seeger holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Physics (2018) from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Brazil, and a Ph.D. in Physics (2021) from the Université Grenoble-Alpes at the SPINTEC laboratory in Grenoble, France. Since 2022 he is a postdoctoral researcher working at SPEC (CEA-Saclay ) and C2N (CNRS, Université Paris Saclay) on projects involving magnon-phonon coupling and nonlinear effects in spin waves.