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

Abstract

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.