Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 22, 2026
Fabrication of Zero Mode Waveguides for High Concentration Single Molecule Microscopy
Published on: May 12, 2020
Continuous-wave laser-based polarization-modulated maskless lithography with parallel meta-atom exposure for
Cheng Peng1, Jiepeng Wu1, Hao Wang1
1Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Structure and Fundamental Interactions of Matter, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanophotonic Functional Materials and Devices, School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China.
Abstract:
Long-wave infrared (LWIR) metalenses are important for compact thermal imaging and remote sensing applications, and a rapid, cost-effective, and high-precision fabrication method is highly desirable. Here, we propose polarization-modulated maskless digital lithography based on a continuous-wave (CW) laser and a spatial light modulator (SLM). One SLM mask encodes N×N independently defined meta-atom patterns, transferred simultaneously to photoresist in one exposure through polarization-based phase-to-intensity conversion and demagnified 4f projection. Compared with sequential single-meta-atom exposure, the number of exposure steps is reduced to approximately 1/N2. Using this approach, we fabricated a 3 mm × 3 mm LWIR metalens with a numerical aperture of 0.25 at 10.6 µm. The device exhibits a measured focal-length error of 1% and a focusing efficiency of 54.7%. The CW laser significantly simplifies the system architecture, reducing capital equipment requirements and enabling a cost-effective and accessible platform for scalable fabrication of LWIR metasurfaces.
