High-throughput microfabrication of axially tunable helices

Abstract

Helical structures exhibit novel optical and mechanical properties and are commonly used in different fields such as metamaterials and microfluidics. A few methods exist for fabricating helical microstructures, but none of them has the throughput or flexibility required for patterning a large surface area with tunable pitch. In this paper, we report a method for fabricating helical structures with adjustable forms over large areas based on multiphoton polymerization (MPP) using single-exposure, three dimensionally structured, self-accelerating, axially tunable light fields. The light fields are generated as a superposition of high-order Bessel modes and have a closed-form expression relating the design of the phase mask to the rotation rate of the beam. The method is used to fabricate helices with different pitches and handedness in the material SU-8. Compared to point-by-point scanning, the method reported here can be used to reduce fabrication time by two orders of magnitude, paving the way for adopting MPP in many industrial applications.