Projection Two-Photon Lithography for Rapid and Versatile Nanoscale 3D Printing

Abstract

High-throughput fabrication techniques for generating arbitrarily complex three-dimensional structures with nanoscale features are desirable across a broad range of applications including healthcare, transportation, and computing. Two-photon lithography (TPL) is a promising additive manufacturing (AM) technique that relies on nonlinear light absorption to fabricate complex 3D structures with polymeric nanoscale features. However, the serial point-by-point writing scheme of TPL is too slow for many applications. We have developed a high-throughput nanoscale AM technique based on parallelization of TPL. Our technique has increased the processing rate by a thousand times while preserving the nanoscale feature sizes. It relies on simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing of an ultrafast laser to implement projection-based layer-by-layer printing. The first part of this talk will focus on how we broke the traditional tradeoff between rate and feature size – a tradeoff that had persisted in the field for more than two decades and was considered unbreakable. The second part will focus on how one may expand the material palette to 3D print various polymeric, metallic, and ceramic structures on the nanoscale.