Three-dimensional microfabrication with two-photon absorbed photopolymerization

Fabrication technology for three-dimensional microstructures with submicrometer accuracy has been needed in the fields of modern optics, such as micro mechanical system driven with photon pressure[1, 2] and laser-trapping near-filed optical microscopy[3]. However, the present accuracy with stereolithography[4] is not yet satisfactory to this purpose. Moreover, it is not so flexible to make a three- dimensional structure with the present technique. In this paper, we propose a new microfabrication method in which a point in three-dimensional volume of UV photopolymerizing resin is photopolymerized through two-photon absorption process. The microfabrication with two-photon absorption drastically improves the depth resolution due to a nonlinearlity between the power of the irradiation and that of the absorption[5].