Additive manufacturing of highly fluorescent organic 3D-metastructures at sub-wavelength resolution

Functional metastructures exhibiting unique optical properties are desirable for advancements in microfluidics, optoelectronics, nonlinear photonics, biochemical sensing, and metamaterials. Additive manufacturing techniques are expected to enable rapid prototyping of complex 3D architectonics required for such applications. We report the fabrication of highly fluorescent all-organic metastructures via carbon quantum dot assisted in-situ polymerization of acrylate and carbon dot composite resin. The polymerized structures fabricated from acrylate and carbon dot composite resin exhibit excellent linear and nonlinear optical properties due to the presence of two-photon active carbon quantum dots incorporated in the resin. By activating the two-photon process, we eliminated the need for adding two-photon absorbing toxic chemicals for initiating the polymerization process. The fabrication of functional nanostructures using acrylate and carbon dot composite resin opens the door for rapid prototyping of metastructures for various applications such as developing functional metamaterials, solid-state lighting, live monitoring of cells in cultures, fluorescent tagging and detection of counterfeiting among others. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.