Multi-photon lithography empowers additive manufacturing of free-form 3D structures. Currently it is being established for production of miniature optical elements including stacked compound components: diffractive, refractive, guiding, filtering, polarizing, and many other optical functions can be merged into monolith devices with super-wavelength and sub-wavelength features. Still such optics are limited to polymers which are low grade in context of optical materials.
We present improvements in their transparency and increasing their laser induced damage threshold (LIDT). This is made by covering the micro-optics with anti-reflective coating employing atomic layer deposition (ALD) method. In contrast to previous reports, the employed material is hybrid organic-inorganic SZ2080TM substance, which be calcinated and turn the objects into glass-ceramics. The transparency after ALD is improved for a single, doublet, and triplet micro-lenses at 633 nm. The calcination increases LIDT for the micro-lenses by several times validated by S-on-1 tests.
The research work opens additive manufacturing of transparent and durable 3D micro-optical components by combining ALD and calcination.
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