Holographic 3D laser nanoprinting at the speed of light

Abstract Light-based 3D printing processes 1 are unmatched in micro/nano-manufacturing owing to their high resolution and potential for scalability. Increases in the printing speeds of these technologies have mostly relied on parallelization approaches such as multiple laser foci 2,3 or image projection 4–6 . Yet these directions are ultimately limited due to the need to mechanically scan the light for printing 7 . A new approach to 3D nanoprinting is therefore required to realize further substantial increases in print speed. Here, we introduce a fully parallel holographic approach that leads to peak print rates 100,000,000,000× faster than existing techniques. To achieve this breakthrough, we encode the information of a target 3D object in a single, femtosecond laser pulse via a computer-generated hologram. As the pulse then propagates through a photo-sensitive medium, it exposes the entire complex-shaped 3D microstructure in a single shot, thereby printing at the speed of light. Our single-pulse approach enables 3D nanoprinting to transition from rapid prototyping to mass fabrication, critical for technology fields including metamaterials 8 , microrobotics 9 , inertial fusion energy 10,11 , or drug delivery 12 , in which many millions or billions of printed objects are needed.