Our project, Scalable Nanomanufacturing of Optical Metasurfaces by Hierarchical Printing and Predictive Modeling, has advanced the science and engineering of nanomanufacturing demonstrating that optical metasurfaces, which are ultrathin structures that can bend, focus, and process light, can be created using advanced fully-additive 3D printing techniques enabled by synthesis of novel precursor inks, printing substrate surface control and advanced metasurface designs.  Specifically, we were able to demonstrate operational NIR lens 3D printed using an electrohydrodynamic inkjet printer from novel alkoxide precursor inks that react to form high index titanium dioxide ceramic scatterers on surface-modified substrates developed in PI Devin MacKenzie's group using refractive metasurface designs using inverse-design methodologies developed by co-PI Arka Majumdar's group at UW (Figure 1).  With further development, the project team has been able to reproducibly print nanoscale features 600nm in diameter towards the demonstrated of near infrared and visible range printed metasurfaces and photonic structures with applications in more compact, lightweight and thin consumer electronics, more efficient solar panels and improved 3D imaging, for example.  We also significantly advanced our understanding of the interactions between the physical properties of the ink materials and the printing process itself.  This has allowed us to print even smaller features and also has allowed us to create printing inks that are much more stable which makes future research and manufacturing much more feasible.

More broadly, the team has developed a new combination of materials, printing technology and design that can be used in further development and eventual commercial manufacturing of this new nanomanufacturing technology and application space, thereby advancing a knowledgebase available to future industry, academic and government researchers and product developers.  The broader community can work with and further develop this technology hands-on in our open-access advanced manufacturing user facility, UW's Washington Clean Energy Testbeds.  The advancements in printing technology, ink formulations chemistry and design are also being disseminated in numerous journal publications, presentations, and tutorials.  This project has also trained several graduate students through their Ph.D. and masters programs.  James Whitehead has received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and is currently working at Micron Technologies, Inc.  and Holly Brunner will be finishing her Ph.D. dissertation in Materials Science and Engineering in the coming months. Maksym Zhelyeznyakov, a graduate researcher in electrical engineering who has been trained through this program has done two internships in Intel and Meta and is currently participating in a study abroad program in Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea.  Knowledge transfer to incoming graduate students who will further develop the concepts and capabilities we have developed here has also been enabled through this program.  In addition, we have also had several undergraduate researchers who, along with the graduate researchers that have been trained and educated under this project, will be entering research and the industrial workforce with the benefit of the cutting-edge research and training enabled by this program.  Lastly, the work within this project has spawned numerous collaborations including seeding a new project combining the printed photonics developed here with quantum dot emitters to create a new pathway for additive, 3D printed, integrated quantum optical computing components and laser cooling materials for future high power optics.

The inverse design techniques developed under the scalable nano-manufacturing also enabled creating several ultra-compact imaging systems, most notably, a lens that of size of salt-grain (Figure 2). By co-optimizing the meta-optics and a computational backend, we captured images which are of much higher quality than previously reported meta-optical imaging.

Last Modified: 11/22/2022
Modified by: John Devin Mackenzie