Lunch and Learn Speaker Series Fall 2020 Speaker:

Sourabh Saha, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Georgia Tech, School of ME

Abstract:
High-throughput fabrication techniques for generating arbitrarily complex three-dimensional structures with nanoscale features are desirable across a broad range of applications including healthcare, transportation, and computing. Two-photon lithography (TPL) is a promising additive manufacturing (AM) technique that relies on nonlinear light absorption to fabricate complex 3D structures with polymeric nanoscale features. However, the serial point-by-point writing scheme of TPL is too slow for many applications. We have developed a high-throughput nanoscale AM technique based on parallelization of TPL. Our technique has increased the processing rate by a thousand times while preserving the nanoscale feature sizes. It relies on simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing of an ultrafast laser to implement projection-based layer-by-layer printing. This talk will focus on how we broke the traditional tradeoff between rate and feature size – a tradeoff that had persisted in the field for more than two decades and was considered unbreakable. Our method allows access to difficult to explore regions in the design space, increasing both the potential for cost-effective high-throughput processing and the geometric complexity of the printed objects.

Bio:
Sourabh Saha is an Assistant Professor in the G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined Georgia Tech in 2019 after a four year stay at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he first worked as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a research engineer. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2014 and his Masters and Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2008. His research interest lies in scaling up advanced manufacturing processes, especially for generation of complex micro and nanoscale 3D structures. His work on nanoscale 3D printing has increased the processing rate by up to a thousand times while printing the thinnest of nanowires. This work was published in the journal Science and has been recognized with a Federal Laboratory Consortium Far West Regional Outstanding Technology Development award.