Breakthrough Made by VU Scientists Opens Up New Opportunities for High-Tech Industry
Scientists at the Laser Research Centre of the Faculty of Physics at Vilnius University (VU), together with colleagues from the VU Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences, have achieved a breakthrough that opens up new opportunities for high-tech industry. The latest research results have also been published in Opto-Electronic Advances, a prestigious optics research journal.
Professor Mangirdas Malinauskas, Dr. Darius Gailevičius and Edvinas Aleksandravičius, together with colleagues from the VU Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences professor Simas Šakirzanovas and doctoral student Greta Merkininkaitė have demonstrated in an interdisciplinary experimental work that laser printing combined with high-temperature heating can be used to produce a variety of crystalline structures whose properties depend on the initial chemical composition of the hybrid organic-inorganic polymer to be processed and the heating parameters.
The method developed by the researchers can produce crystalline structures with a record high resolution of up to 60 nm, and the objects themselves retain their geometric shape even when heated up to 1400 ℃.
“Our results open up conceptually new possibilities to optically micro- and nano-print 3D formations using the widely used photopolymerisation process, while endowing the final formulation with the properties of inorganic materials: temperature resistance, mechanical hardness, transparency, chemical inertness and others,” emphasizes professor Malinauskas.
This technology enables major breakthroughs in the production of micro-optical, nanophotonic, biomedical, micro-mechanical or microfluidic cells with ultra-high resolution and precision, transparency and resistance to harsh temperature or chemical environments.
“The application of the published technology allows accurate prediction of the chemical and crystallographic composition of the final three-dimensional structures, which opens up a wide range of possibilities for controlling the physicochemical properties. Until now, laser printing has been mainly focused on the influence of the physical parameters of the technology on the shape and resolution of the structures produced, limiting it to commercially available compounds only. Controlling the chemical composition of the formed objects opens up a much broader range of applications for this technology, as there is no restriction on the materiality of the structures,” emphasizes professor Šakirzanovas.
Devices built with such components would have a long lifetime and could operate in vacuum or under severe temperature and pressure variations, so they could even be used in outer space.
The research was carried out in the framework of the projects "Absorption enhancement by light retardation in photonic nanoparticles and its application in efficient sensors" (W911NF-16-2-0069, AMRDEC) and "LaserLab Europe" (871124, H2020).