A multi-photon (7 × 7)-focus 3D laser printer based on a 3D-printed diffractive optical element and a 3D-printed multi-lens array

• Published in: Light: advanced manufacturing 2024-01, Vol.4 (1), p.1-14
• Main Authors: Kiefer, Pascal, Hahn, Vincent, Kalt, Sebastian, Sun, Qing, Eggeler, Yolita M., Wegener, Martin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 3d laser printing; diffractive optical element; direct laser writing; lens array; multi-focus optics; multi-photon absorption
• ISSN: 2831-4093; 2689-9620
• DOI: 10.37188/lam.2024.003

One of the challenges in the field of multi-photon 3D laser printing lies in further increasing the print speed in terms of voxels/s. Here, we present a setup based on a 7 × 7 focus array (rather than 3 × 3 in our previous work) and using a focus velocity of about 1 m/s (rather than 0.5 m/s in our previous work) at the diffraction limit (40×/NA1.4 microscope objective lens). Combined, this advance leads to a ten times increased print speed of about 108 voxels/s. We demonstrate polymer printing of a chiral metamaterial containing more than 1.7 × 1012 voxels as well as millions of printed microparticles for potential pharmaceutical applications. The critical high-quality micro-optical components of the setup, namely a diffractive optical element generating the 7 × 7 beamlets and a 7 × 7 lens array, are manufactured by using a commercial two-photon grayscale 3D laser printer.