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3D-printed silica with nanoscale resolution

Nature Materials volume 20, pages 1506–1511 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fabricating inorganic materials with designed three-dimensional nanostructures is an exciting yet challenging area of research and industrial application. Here, we develop an approach to 3D print high-quality nanostructures of silica with sub-200 nm resolution and with the flexible capability of rare-earth element doping. The printed SiO2 can be either amorphous glass or polycrystalline cristobalite controlled by the sintering process. The 3D-printed nanostructures demonstrate attractive optical properties. For instance, the fabricated micro-toroid optical resonators can reach quality factors (Q) of over 104. Moreover, and importantly for optical applications, doping and codoping of rare-earth salts such as Er3+, Tm3+, Yb3+, Eu3+ and Nd3+ can be directly implemented in the printed SiO2 structures, showing strong photoluminescence at the desired wavelengths. This technique shows the potential for building integrated microphotonics with silica via 3D printing.

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Fig. 1: Process of 2PP-enabled 3D printing of silica.
Fig. 2: Microstructures of silica printed using the proposed 2PP-enabled AM technique.
Fig. 3: Optical applications of printed silica resonator.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

X.W., B.Z., W.W., H.G., Q.F., C.N. and J.L. gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Welch Foundation grant C-1716. J.B. gratefully acknowledges the financial support by the Welch Foundation grant E-1728. This work was conducted in part using resources of the Shared Equipment Authority at Rice University. We thank J. Li at the Shared Equipment Authority of Rice University for help with the SAXS experiments. We also thank X-M. Lin at Argonne National Laboratory for help with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy experiments.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Xiewen Wen, Boyu Zhang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Xiewen Wen, Boyu Zhang, Weipeng Wang, Hua Guo, Guanhui Gao, Yushun Zhao, Qiyi Fang, Christine Nguyen, Xiang Zhang, Pulickel M. Ajayan & Jun Lou

  2. Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials (MOE), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China

    Weipeng Wang

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Fan Ye & Jacob T. Robinson

  4. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Shuai Yue & Jiming Bao

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  1. Xiewen Wen
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Contributions

X.W., J.L. and P.M.A. designed the experiment; X.W. and B.Z. performed the nanocomposite ink preparation and 2PP printing; X.W., B.Z., W.W., H.G., G.G., Y.Z., Q.F., C.N. and X.Z. contributed to sample characterization; F.Y. and J.T.R. helped with the optical resonator test; and S.Y. and J.B. helped with the photoluminescence measurements.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Weipeng Wang, Jacob T. Robinson, Pulickel M. Ajayan or Jun Lou.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Materials thanks Paolo Colombo, Kunal Masania and Bastian Rapp for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–6 and Discussion.

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Source Data Fig. 3

Source data for curves in Fig. 3.

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Wen, X., Zhang, B., Wang, W. et al. 3D-printed silica with nanoscale resolution. Nat. Mater. 20, 1506–1511 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01111-2

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