Abstract
The orbital angular momentum of an optical vortex field is found to twist high viscosity donor material to form a micron-scale 'spin jet'. This unique phenomenon manifests the helical trajectory of the optical vortex. Going beyond both the conventional ink jet and laser induced forward mass transfer (LIFT) patterning technologies, it also offers the formation and ejection of a micron-scale 'spin jet' of the donor material even with an ultrahigh viscosity of 4 Pa·s. This optical vortex laser induced forward mass transfer (OV-LIFT) patterning technique will enable the development of next generation printed photonic/electric/spintronic circuits formed of ultrahigh viscosity donor dots containing functional nanoparticles, such as quantum dots, metallic particles and magnetic ferrite particles, with ultrahigh spatial resolution. It can also potentially explore a completely new needleless drug injection.
Highlights
The nozzle based ink jet technique is capable of printing anywhere with selectivity using a micrometer-scale liquid droplet to shape various patterns; it is widely used in fields such as color image printing, printed photonics/electronics/spintronics and integrated optical circuits as a non-contact process [1,2,3]
The authors and co-workers reported that a laser materials processing technique, employing an optical field with orbital angular momentum (OAM), enables the fabrication of unique material structures, such as chiral metal structures and silicon needles on an irradiated target assisted by the spin angular momentum (SAM) [16,17,18,19,20]
After irradiation by the optical vortex pulse, the donor film formed a jet within approximately 4 μs (Fig. 2(a), see supplementary file 1)
Summary
The nozzle based ink jet technique is capable of printing anywhere with selectivity using a micrometer-scale liquid droplet to shape various patterns; it is widely used in fields such as color image printing, printed (or flexible) photonics/electronics/spintronics and integrated optical circuits as a non-contact process [1,2,3]. This technique has several drawbacks, in that it is difficult to form and eject high viscosity droplets containing functional nanoparticles, such as quantum dots, metallic particles and magnetic ferrite particles, with viscosities greater than 0.1 Pa∙s. During fabrication of silicon needles, the optical vortex was determined to provide a spin on molten silicon droplets (viscous droplets), which resulted in the efficient accumulation and straight flight of micrometer-scale molten silicon droplets, so-called ‘silicon jet’. [21] Such an optical vortex should provide an entirely new technique for applications such as the patterning of ultrahigh viscosity donor droplets with ultrahigh spatial resolution and extremely long flight distance, beyond both conventional nozzle based ink jet and LIFT technologies
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