Cracks are observed in many environments, including walls, dried wood, and even the Earth’s crust, and are often thought of as an unavoidable, unwanted phenomenon. Recent research advances have demonstrated the capability of using cracks to produce various micro and nanoscale patterns. However, patterns are usually limited by the chosen substrate material and the applied tensile stresses. Here, we describe an innovative cracking-assisted nanofabrication technique that relies only on a standard photolithography process. This novel technique produces well-controlled nanopatterns in any desired shape and in a variety of geometric dimensions, over large areas and with a high-throughput. In addition, we show that mixed-scale patterns fabricated using the proposed technique can be used as master moulds for replicating numerous nanofluidic devices via soft lithography, which to the best of our knowledge is a technique that has not been reported in previous studies on materials’ mechanical failure, including cracking. |