Recently, our school has made new progress in the fabrication of micro/nano-optical devices. The related work, entitled “Diamond-Enhanced Nanoimprint Lithography for Fabrication of Micro/Nano-Optical Elements,” was published in ACS Photonics, an important journal in the field of optics and photonics. This work focuses on diamond-enhanced nanoimprint lithography and proposes a new fabrication strategy for micro/nano-optical elements that combines high precision, high stability, and high throughput.
Micro/nano-optics is an important foundation for next-generation photonic systems and shows broad application prospects in imaging, communication, sensing, quantum technologies, and other fields. However, conventional fabrication methods such as electron-beam lithography and focused ion beam etching suffer from high cost, low efficiency, and difficulties in large-scale manufacturing. To address this challenge, the researchers took advantage of diamond’s excellent mechanical hardness, chemical inertness, high thermal conductivity, and low thermal expansion coefficient to construct a diamond-enhanced nanoimprint lithography platform.
Using this platform, the team achieved high-fidelity replication and fabrication of various micro/nano-optical elements, including diffractive Fresnel zone plates, metalenses, refractive microlens arrays, and reflective gratings. Experimental results show that this technique not only provides excellent structural replication accuracy and device performance, but also exhibits outstanding template durability, maintaining stable structural features and fabrication quality even after multiple imprinting cycles.
Figure 1.
(a) Schematic illustration of ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography using a diamond template. (b) Optical microscope image of the diamond template, (c) image of the replicated PDMS soft template, and (d) image of the Zhengzhou University logo pattern fabricated in UV-curable resist. The logo is used with permission from Zhengzhou University.
This work demonstrates that diamond-enhanced nanoimprint lithography is expected to overcome the limitations of conventional nanofabrication in terms of template lifetime and mass-production capability. It provides a new route for the low-cost and scalable fabrication of advanced micro/nano-optical devices, showing promising application prospects in augmented reality, LiDAR, quantum photonics, and related fields.
The first authors of this paper are Wenhao Sun and Kexue Li, who contributed equally to this work. The corresponding authors are Prof. Peinan Ni and Prof. Chongxin Shan. Zhengzhou University is one of the participating institutions of this work.
