China's femtosecond laser combined with self-assembly composite processing technology received a breakthrough

Recently, it was learned from the University of Science and Technology of China that the micro and nano engineering laboratory in the School of Engineering Sciences of the university used femtosecond laser-guided capillary force self-assembly composite processing method to realize the flexible preparation of chiral controllable 3D microstructures and 3D metal nano-gap structures, and realized the application in vortex optical chirality detection and high-sensitivity biochemical detection, and the related research results were published recently in Advanced Materials and Advanced Functional Materials, respectively.

Chiral microstructures have important application potential in the fields of optics and mechanics, and can be used to construct a wide variety of optical and mechanical metamaterials. At present, there are still many difficulties in the flexible and controllable preparation of 3D chiral microstructures. The Laboratory of Micro and Nano Engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has carried out long-term systematic research in femtosecond laser composite processing. By combining femtosecond laser direct writing with capillary force self-assembly technology, they have developed a novel femtosecond laser composite processing method, realized the preparation of complex multilayer polymer structures, and carried out applied research in various fields such as micro-object manipulation, particle preparation, micro-optics, and capillary-like microchannel preparation.

Based on the previous work, the research team combined femtosecond laser direct writing with capillary force-driven self-assembly technology to successfully fabricate multilayer chiral microstructures by modulating the spatial arrangement, structural size and other parameters of the microstructures and guiding the direction and magnitude of the capillary force, and demonstrated the high flexibility and scalability of the method.

In addition, the team successfully fabricated three-dimensional metal nanogap structures using this femtosecond laser composite processing method and achieved highly sensitive detection of the typical surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopic SERS subject matter R6G and the anticancer drug DOX. This research provides a new method for constructing metal nanogap structures on non-flat surfaces, and has the potential to apply microfluidic-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for precision medicine and real-time online detection.

Translated with www.dotslaser.com