Additive and subtractive manufacturing of gold micro/nanostructures by using laser trapping and ablation

• Gold micro/nanostructures have attracting characters, and have been extensively used. Laser trapping provides a direct writing technology for fabricating gold micro/nanostructures with simple principle and process. In this manuscript, an additive and subtractive hybrid manufacturing technology by using laser trapping and ablation was proposed and realized first time. A gold microring with line width of 37 nm was fabricated. Several three-dimensional microstructures were also fabricated first time after systematically studied influences of the laser wavelength and power for additive manufacturing of gold micro/nanostructures by using laser trapping. This work provides a new additive and subtractive hybrid manufacturing method for fabrication of high spatial resolution metal nanostructures and a protocol for fabrication of three-dimensional metal microstructures by using laser trapping. Development of manufacturing technology for micro/nanostructures is significant and attractive. It will catch eyes of the laser application researchers and engineers. Gold micro/nanostructures were additively manufactured by using laser trapping of gold nanoparticles in an aqueous solution. Gold wire composed of sintered compacted nanoparticles with spatial resolution of 470 nm was fabricated. Influence factors for wire fabrications were also studied systematically. In order to investigate the fabrication capacity of this technology for three-dimensional structures, several microstructures were fabricated. A new additive and subtractive hybrid manufacturing technology by using laser trapping and ablation was proposed and realized to further improve the spatial resolution of the fabricated structures. A gold microring with line width of 37 nm was fabricated through precisely controlling fabrication parameters. This hybrid manufacturing technology has great application prospects in the fabrication of high spatial resolution nanostructures.