Two-Photon Lithography Means Nanoscale 3-D Printing
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - 13:20
in Physics & Chemistry
A new high-precision 3-D printer at TU Vienna is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices and opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine. "Two-photon lithography" means tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated quicker than ever.Their 3-D printer uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a polymerized line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This high resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. read more