3D Printing and Endofabrication
A complete method for additive manufacturing –also known as 3D printing- using a multimode optical fiber is demonstrated. Up to now, 3D printing systems have required large optical elements or nozzles in proximity to the built structure. In this system, we use time-gated digital phase conjugation, which consists of two steps: the calibration and the reconstruction step.
Each focused spot on the distal side of the MMF corresponds to a speckle pattern at the proximal side of the MMF. The beam, which is focused and guided through the MMF, is called object beam and interferes with the reference beam for hologram recording. Therefore, we focus and scan optical pulses through the MMF and by exploiting the recorded holograms, we reproduce the phases and generate the initial focused spots at the distal fiber tip.
Consequently, by using digital phase conjugation and wavefront shaping, femtosecond infrared pulses are focused and scanned through a multimode optical fiber (MMF) inside a photoresist that polymerizes and via two-photon absorption voxels with small volume are polymerized for building high-resolution 3D structures. Our work represents a new area which we refer to as endofabrication.
Contacts: Georgia Konstantinou