Additive manufacturing is a technique in which the final three-dimensional object is produced by successively adding new layers of building material to those that have already been deposited. Recently, the commercially available 3D printers have been experiencing rapid development and so do the 3D-printers materials, including transparent media of high optical quality. These advancements open up new possibilities in many fields of science and technology including biology, medicine, metamaterials studies, robotics and micro-optics. Researchers from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Poland, have designed tiny lenses that can easily be manufactured by laser 3D printing technique on top of various materials, including fragile novel 2D graphene-like materials.
Scanning electron microscope image of 3D-printed aspherical microlenses. Thanks to short printing time, it is possible to produce hundreds of such microlenses on one sample. (Source: A. Bogucki et al., U. Warsaw)
The presented lenses increase the extraction of light emitted from semiconductor samples and reshape its outgoing part into an ultranarrow beam. Thanks to this property, there is no longer a need for including a bulky microscope objective in the experimental setup when performing optical measurements of single nanometer-sized light emitters like quantum dots, which up to now could not be avoided. A typical microscope objective used in such a study has roughly a handbreadth size, weights up to one pound and must be placed at a distance of about one-tenth of a few millimeters from the analysed sample. These impose significant limitations on many types of modern experiments, like measurements in pulsed high magnetic fields, at cryogenic temperatures or in microwave cavities, which on the other hand can easily be lifted by the presented lenses.
High speed of the 3D-printing technique makes it very easy to produce hundreds of microlenses on one sample. Arranging them into regular arrays provides a convenient coordinate system, which accurately specifies the location of a chosen nanoobject and allows for its multiple measurements in different laboratories all over the world. The invaluable opportunity of coming back to the same light emitter allows for much more time-efficient research and hypothesis testing. Specifically, one can entirely focus on designing and performing a new experiment on the nanoobject studied before, instead of carrying out a time-consuming investigation of thousands of other nanoobjects before eventually finding an analogue to the previous one.
The shape of the proposed microlenses can easily be adapted to the 2.5D microfabrication technique. The objects satisfying its prerequisites can be produced over large-scale surfaces by pressing a patterned stamp against the layer of material they are supposed to be made of. The 2.5D fabrication protocol is especially attractive from the viewpoint of potential applications of the microlenses, as can be readily up-scaled which is an important factor in possible future industrial use. (Source: CAS)
Link: Solid State Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
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