Scalable submicrometer additive manufacturing

• Published in: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 366; no. 6461; pp. 105 - 109
• Main Authors: Saha, Sourabh K, Wang, Dien, Nguyen, Vu H, Chang, Yina, Oakdale, James S, Chen, Shih-Chi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States The American Association for the Advancement of Science 04-10-2019; AAAS
• Subjects: Additive manufacturing; Fabrication; Lasers; Lithography; Manufacturing; MATERIALS SCIENCE; Mechanical and civil engineering; Nanoscience; Nanotechnology; Nanowires; Photons; Photopolymerization; Printing; Ultrafast lasers
• ISSN: 0036-8075; 1095-9203
• DOI: 10.1126/science.aax8760

High-throughput fabrication techniques for generating arbitrarily complex three-dimensional structures with nanoscale features are desirable across a broad range of applications. Two-photon lithography (TPL)-based submicrometer additive manufacturing is a promising candidate to fill this gap. However, the serial point-by-point writing scheme of TPL is too slow for many applications. Attempts at parallelization either do not have submicrometer resolution or cannot pattern complex structures. We overcome these difficulties by spatially and temporally focusing an ultrafast laser to implement a projection-based layer-by-layer parallelization. This increases the throughput up to three orders of magnitude and expands the geometric design space. We demonstrate this by printing, within single-digit millisecond time scales, nanowires with widths smaller than 175 nanometers over an area one million times larger than the cross-sectional area.