Taming Laser Wavefronts for Advanced Multiphoton Polymerization

Processing of materials or 3D additive manufacturing by ultrashort laser pulses has evolved significantly over the last decade and is starting to reveal its scientific, technological and industrial potential with numerous applications in mechanics, optics, and the life sciences. Its configuration is to assemble small material building blocks, referred to as three-dimensional (3D) volume elements or voxels (volume pixels), into complex 3D functional architectures with increasing flexibility in geometry designing. Multiphoton Polymerization (MPP) by Direct Laser Writing (DLW) [1] is a well-established technique for the fabrication of 3D micro- or nano-structures with high resolution. Although this technique has been regarded as a powerful method for many practical applications like photonics, metamaterials, micro-optics, scaffolds for tissue engineering or biomedical implants, this conventional single point by point, high spatial resolution writing routine is highly time-consuming when is combined with demands for parallel processing, large area or volume fabrication, long scale structuring, massive production or high aspect ratio structures.