High-throughput microfabrication of axially tunable helices

Abstract

Helical structures exhibit novel optical and mechanical properties and are commonly used in different fields such as metamaterials and microfluidics. A few methods exist for fabricating helical microstructures, but none of them has the throughput or flexibility required for patterning a large surface area with tunable pitch. In this paper, we report a method for fabricating helical structures with adjustable forms over large areas based on multiphoton polymerization (MPP) using single-exposure, three dimensionally structured, self-accelerating, axially tunable light fields. The light fields are generated as a superposition of high-order Bessel modes and have a closed-form expression relating the design of the phase mask to the rotation rate of the beam. The method is used to fabricate helices with different pitches and handedness in the material SU-8. Compared to point-by-point scanning, the method reported here can be used to reduce fabrication time by two orders of magnitude, paving the way for adopting MPP in many industrial applications.

Generation of dynamic rotation propagation vortex beam by a Fibonacci series annular subzone vortex phase

“…We also define the focal length of the proposed FVB. Because of the novel property of FVB, we expect that FVB will be the novel OV and have the potential applications in optical vortex information encryption [46], optical communications, nanofabrication [47,48] and optical tweezers [49].…”

High-Throughput Two-Photon 3D Printing Enabled by Holographic Multi-Foci High-Speed Scanning

“…By adopting sensitive photoresists with lower polymerization thresholds and intricate grayscale manipulation to optimize the intensity distribution, light patterns with larger foci number and overall sizes can be generated without compromising uniformity. Various phase information can be encoded on CGH to reconstruct light fields with higher degrees of freedom, including 3D multi-foci arrays , and various structure light arrays, , which endows the strategy with more flexibility and efficiency. With the above upgrade, our printing platform will continue to find new opportunities in micro/nanomanufacturing in numerous fields.…”

3D Laser Nanoprinting of Functional Materials

“…[ 52 ] Taking advantage of improved processing continuity, SLM can be utilized to shape the incident wavefront to generate a successive 3D focal field for continuous fabrication and thus improve the manufacturing throughput. [ 53 ] A double‐helix focal field was generated by using a phase‐only hologram on the SLM (Figure 6e). [ 54 ] It is noted that the corresponding 3D silver helical structure was fabricated by a single exposure of femtosecond laser (Figure 6f).…”