Lithography articles from across Nature Portfolio

3D-printed glass holds great potential. However, it is challenging to control both the dimension and the resolution of the printed material. Here, authors present a one-photon 3D printing approach to produce high-performance fused silica glass with sub-micron resolution and millimetric dimensions.

Scanning tunnelling microscopy-based H desorption lithography is used for atomic-scale patterning of quantum devices in Si, but its time-consuming nature hinders scalability. Here the authors report H desorption from Si(001):H surface using extreme-UV light and explore implications for patterning.

This Review categorizes the physics of many different light-based 3D printing modalities and expounds on the light–matter interactions required for the creation of (multi-)material 3D structures. An outlook is provided regarding key printing performance parameters and future directions.

Volumetric additive manufacturing generally suffers from systematic undercuring of fine features, which limits its application range. Here, authors develop a model to predict print time variation with feature size and propose a deconvolution method, enabling precise fabrication of intricate structures.

A lithography-free photonic processor through dynamic control of optical gain distributions is demonstrated, allowing reconfigurable photonic neural networks and more efficient signal processing, and showing great promise in easing data traffic as well as accelerating information processing speeds.

For 20 years, nanoscale 3D printing has been based on two-photon absorption, requiring expensive pulsed lasers. Now, via a two-step absorption process, such printing has been demonstrated using a low-cost, low-power continuous-wave laser diode, showing the potential for dramatic cost reductions in 3D nanoprinting.

Discovery of new materials has been traditionally based on a trial-and-error approach. Now, miniaturized nanoreactors have been developed for the synthesis and analysis of nanoparticle megalibraries of different size and composition.