Two-photon polymerization of silica glass diffractive micro-optics with minimal lateral shrinkage

Three-dimensional printing enables the fabrication of silica glass optics with complex structures. However, shrinkage remains a significant obstacle to high-precision 3D printing of glass optics. Here we 3D-printed Dammann gratings (DGs) with low lateral shrinkage (<4%) using a two-photon polymerization (2PP) technique. The process consists of two steps: patterning two-photon polymerizable glass slurry with a 515 nm femtosecond laser to form desired structures and debinding/sintering the structures into transparent and dense silica glass. The sintered structures exhibited distinct shrinkage rates in the lateral against longitudinal directions. As the aspect ratio of the structures increased, the lateral shrinkage decreased, while the longitudinal shrinkage increased. Specifically, the structure with an aspect ratio of approximately 60 achieved a minimal lateral shrinkage of 1.1%, the corresponding longitudinal shrinkage was 61.7%. The printed DGs with a surface roughness below 20 nm demonstrated good beam-shaping performance. The presented technique opens up possibilities for rapid prototyping of silica diffractive optical elements.