3-D laser fabrication: enabling nano-optics for the nano-sciences

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Nanoscience and nanotechnology define significant trends today that seek to exploit the new physical laws encountered as the structures and devices we make become smaller and smaller. Most attention is on the quantum effects that dramatically alter the electrical, magnetic, optical, mechanical - virtually all - properties of materials in surprising but exceedingly useful ways. Optical physics is playing a significant role in both these trends. Near-field, multi-photon, and confocal microscopy and laser tweezers are opening the frontiers of nanoscience by probing and manipulating individual nanostructures, while laser lithography is a nanotechnology used in high-volume manufacturing of nano-size transistor gates in microelectronic chips. As this race to shrink the world goes forward, optical physics is also evolving with its own set of challenges to understand and to harness the new optical phenomena in nanostructures much smaller than the wavelength of light. Nanooptics has emerged as the new discipline that promises new optical materials (photonic bandgap crystals, metamaterials, plasmatronics) to guide light at dimensions below conventional diffraction limits or probe the electron wavefunction of protein molecules with powerfully enhanced optical resolution. To this end, the proposed NSERC program seeks to invent a new means of laser optical beam delivery that will facilitate the fabrication of 3-D nano-optical systems. Near-field and phase-shifting techniques will be exploited in multi-level diffractive optical elements to design 'intensity defects' within 3-D periodic interfering laser patterns. Photosensitive optical materials exposed to these modified laser patterns will see nanooptic devices precisely embedded at the critical points of a 3-D periodic lattice to enable the nanofabrication of compact 3-D photonic crystal circuits, 3-D optical-domain metamaterials, and nanofluidic chromatography sensors for cell proteomics. This significant extension of laser holography promises a powerful advance in nanooptics and defines a new paradigm for high-volume manufacturing - contactless 3-D nanomolding - of significance to Canada's optics, biophotonics, and nanotechnology industry.