The Nanoscribe Photonic Professional GT2 is a microfabrication unit based on multi-photon lithography. Multi-photon lithography utilizes multi-photon absorption to cure a tuned photo-resin only within a confined spot. The focal spot acts as voxel (3D-pixel) upon object built-up with translation movement. With a slicing and hatching strategy known from laser-based stereolithography, this uniquely curing mechanism facilitates a 2 – 4 magnitudes smaller length scale objects, compared to standard resin-based 3D printers. Thus, complex 3D polymer structures with feature sizes down to 160 nm can be printed, although stable free-standing structures need larger dimensions of several hundred nanometers (~2 voxel diameters).
The employed objective defines the smallest printable volume (voxel size). Different feature sets, consisting of objective, standard resin, and substrate are available, optimized for manufacturing objects in specific size ranges. The “small features set” allows for manufacturing structures with sub-micrometer resolution. The “large features set” enables faster printing speed and higher volumes, although slightly reduced resolution of a few microns.
The device typically operates in immersion mode, where the resin pool resides between the substrate and the objective. Conveniently, a built-in feature can automatically find the interface towards the substrate based on the refractive index change. With predefined processing recipes, standard resins enable straightforward printing on predefined substrates. Otherwise, custom resins and substrates can be used due to the system's open architecture, although careful parameter tuning may be required.
A camera live view, through the objective, enables supervision of the printing process and precise positioning of the print on predefined spots as well as custom substrates. The digital model can eighter originate from a CAD file or be manually defined through the printer's scripting language. Especially the combination of both, predefined files and pre-scripted commands, opens many possibilities with regards to automatization and surface patterning. Further information and current application examples can be found on the homepage of the device manufacturer.
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If you are interested in using the instrument please contact Christoph Gammer (oeaw.ac.at) or Daniel Kiener (unileoben.ac.at)
The Infrastructure was funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) in the framework of the F&E infrastructure program SmartNanoTop (ffg.at).