Effect of the resin viscosity on the writing properties of two-photon polymerization

While the role of resin viscosity has been largely studied for stereolithography, where a very low viscosity material is preferred, an extensive study of its microscale counterpart, two-photon polymerization, is still lacking. In the present work, we tried to fill the gap by correlating directly the properties of the features produced by two-photon polymerization with the viscosity of four acrylate materials, prepared by mixing two monomers with very different viscosity, and a constant quantity of photoinitiator. Linewidth, polymerization and damage thresholds, dynamic range, and fabrication resolution have been object of investigation in our experiments. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement