Maskless multibeam laser irradiation enables large-area nanostructure fabrication

Laser-interference and laser microlens-array lithography provide sig-nificant resolution advances towards high-speed nanomanufacturing. Compared to other precision-engineering tools, laser irradiation has the unique advantages—as a noncontact process—of being flexible to set up and having high-speed processing capabilities in air, vacuum, or liquid environments. Therefore, laser preci-sion engineering plays an important role in a range of indus-tries. Importantly, lasers can be easily focused to perform small-scale procedures such as marking, drilling, recrystalizing amor-phous silicon, and surface cleaning and modification, making them uniquely suited to nanoscale fabrication processes. How-ever, to cater to the demands for ever-smaller processing reso-lutions, the limits imposed by optical diffraction must be over-come. We recently demonstrated that lasers operating in th