Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers and scientists, in collaboration with Stanford University, have demonstrated a breakthrough 3D nanofabrication approach that transforms two-photon lithography (TPL) from a slow, lab-scale technique into a wafer-scale manufacturing tool without sacrificing submicron precision.
Published today in Nature, the team’s TPL platform uses large arrays of metalenses — engineered, ultrathin optical elements — to split a femtosecond laser into more than 120,000 coordinated focal spots that write simultaneously across centimeter-scale areas. The metalens-based method produces intricate 3D architectures with minimum feature sizes of 113 nanometers and achieves throughput more than a thousand times faster than commercial systems.
