One-Photon Three-Dimensional Printed Fused Silica Glass with Sub-Micron Features

Glass made from silica has a history of thousands of years, and its applications have accompanied the evolution of human civilization. From everyday life to cutting-edge industries, such as micro-optics, micro-electronics, and micro-fluidics, necessitates the high-precision manufacturing of three-dimensional (3D) fused silica glass objects. Advanced 3D printing technologies have emerged as a powerful tool for fabricating arbitrary glass objects with ultimate freedom and precision. Stereolithography and femtosecond direct writing showed their capability in shaping 3D glass objects with ~50 <i>μ</i>m and ~100 nm features, respectively, however, to efficiently fabricating glass structures with centimeter size and sub-micron features still remains challenge. Presented here, our study demonstrates that the gap can be effectively bridged by engineering of appropriate materials, 3D printing based on one-photon micro-stereolithography (O<i>μ</i>SL), allows the flexible creation of transparent and high-performance fused silica glass components with sophisticated, 3D sub-micron architectures. The methodology facilitates the construction of fused silica glass components with arbitrary 3D-specific geometries featuring fine details as small as 900 nm, while also enabling rapid prototyping of structures of several millimeters. This offers unprecedented possibilities across a range of applications, including micro-optics, microfluidics, mechanical metamaterials, and engineered surfaces.