Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory (LLNL) engineers and Stanford College researchers have developed a brand new strategy to two-photon lithography (TPL) that considerably will increase manufacturing velocity whereas sustaining nanoscale precision. The workforce’s technique, revealed in Nature, makes use of metalens arrays to separate a femtosecond laser into greater than 120,000 coordinated focal spots that function concurrently throughout centimeter-scale areas. The system achieves throughput greater than a thousand occasions quicker than industrial techniques whereas producing 3D buildings with minimal characteristic sizes of 113 nanometers.
Conventional TPL has been restricted by its reliance on microscope goals, which confined printable areas to some hundred microns. Bigger prints required stitching 1000’s of tiles collectively, creating alignment errors and stopping industrial adoption. The brand new metalens TPL strategy replaces the microscope goal with a tiled array of high-numerical-aperture metalenses, with every lens functioning as a miniature printer.
The workforce built-in a spatial gentle modulator that adjusts the depth of every focal spot in actual time, permitting the system to change beams on or off and management linewidths. “Through the mission, we realized that by dynamically switching the focal spots on and off and thoroughly planning the printing trajectory, we will truly print totally stochastic buildings with a excessive diploma of parallelization,” mentioned Xiaoxing Xia, an LLNL supplies engineer and principal investigator. This adaptive functionality permits the fabrication of non-periodic buildings and complicated designs.
The expertise, named MetaLitho3D, has potential purposes in microfluidics, quantum info, microelectronics, photonics, and biomedicine. The platform can fabricate tens of thousands and thousands of micro-particles per day and will scale up LLNL’s analysis on 3D printing fusion gasoline capsules and quantum computing chips. The expertise just lately gained a 2025 R&D 100 Award, suggesting industrial viability for industrial purposes.
Supply: llnl.gov
