Single-exposure holographic 3D printing via inverse-designed phase masks

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel single-exposure holographic 3D printing method that uses inverse-designed phase masks to rapidly fabricate complex volumetric structures with high resolution, significantly improving speed and scalability over traditional layer-by-layer techniques.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new holographic 3D printing approach combining inverse-designed phase masks with engineered photopolymer resins for fast, high-fidelity volumetric fabrication in a single exposure.

Findings

Fabricated millimeter-scale 3D structures with over 1 million voxels in 7.5 seconds.

Achieved a volumetric throughput of approximately 1 mm³ per second.

Demonstrated the method's scalability and potential for high-throughput manufacturing.

Abstract

Additive manufacturing using light is commonly constrained by serial voxel-by-voxel or layer-by-layer processing, which fundamentally limits fabrication speed and scalability. Here, we introduce a single-exposure holographic three-dimensional (3D) printing approach that synthesizes an entire volumetric dose distribution optically in one step. The method combines inverse-designed microstructured phase masks with photopolymer resins engineered for controlled optical absorption. By precisely tailoring the phase-mask topography, we generate arbitrary 3D light-intensity distributions within the resin, including intentionally encoded dark regions that define hollow internal features. Simultaneously, the resin formulation is designed to balance optical penetration with sufficient local energy deposition to achieve high-fidelity polymerization throughout the volume. Using this approach, millimeter-scale architectures comprising more than $10^{6}$ addressable voxels are fabricated in a single 7.5~s exposure, corresponding to a volumetric throughput of $\sim$1~mm$^{3}$/s ($>10^{5}$~voxels/s). The demonstrated performance is presently limited by resin kinetics and illumination geometry rather than by the phase-mask framework itself. Because the volumetric information capacity scales with the space--bandwidth product of the phase mask, this approach provides a clear pathway toward substantially higher throughput, enabling scalable fabrication of micro-optical components, biomedical scaffolds, and other precision-engineered mesoscale systems.