Publication date: 21st July 2025
Photonic architectures offer a promising avenue for optimizing the performance of various optoelectronic devices. Nevertheless, the future of optoelectronic devices hinges on cost-effective and large-scale manufacturing techniques that can reduce expenses and boost production efficiency. To harness the remarkable attributes of photonic structures for enhancing these devices, they must undergo a processing approach akin to that of the devices themselves.
In our research group, we employ soft nanoimprinting lithography, a versatile, rapid, and cost-efficient method for crafting nanostructures from a diverse variety of materials. In soft nanoimprinting lithography, we make use of pre-patterned soft elastomeric stamps to fabricate photonic structures out of materials such as resists, biopolymers, colloids and nanomaterials in general. In all cases, the resulting photonic architectures can exhibit a resolution below 100 nm while covering areas up to 1 cm2.
During this presentation, I will demonstrate our utilization of pre-patterned stamps to induce the long-range alignment of different colloids, including gold colloids and perovskite nanocrystals, to attain distinct optical properties, such as lattice resonances with high Q-factors. Moreover, I will showcase how elastomeric molds pre-patterned with chiral motifs can lead to chiral 2D arrays, exhibiting strong circular dichroism and intense circularly polarized photoluminescence (CPL) combined with a wide range of emitters, making them seamlessly applicable in various practical applications.1,2
1. Qi, X. et al. Chiral plasmonic superlattices from template-assisted assembly of achiral nanoparticles. Nat. Commun. 16, 1687 (2025).
2. Mendoza-Carreño, J. et al. A single nanophotonic platform for producing circularly polarized white light from non-chiral emitters. Nat. Commun. 15, 10443 (2024).
This work has received funding from the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI/MCIN) through grants, PID2022-141956NB-I00 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033(OUTLIGHT), and CEX2023-001263-S (Spanish Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence program) and from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2021-SGR-00444). This research was also supported by the EIC PATHFINDER CHALLENGES project 101162112 (RADIANT), funded by the European Union.