By Anne Trafton

Using a new technique that can create vacancies at any site across a material and then shrink it to about 1/2,000 of its original volume, MIT researchers have designed nanotechnology devices that could be used for optical computing and other applications involving the manipulation of visible light.

The new fabrication technique, known as “implosion carving,” allows researchers to imprint features throughout a hydrogel using photopatterning. If patterned with a resolution of about 800 nanometers, these features can then be shrunk to less than 100 nanometers. 

Because that resolution is smaller than the wavelength of light, the devices can bend light in specific ways that allow them to perform optical computations.

Gaojie Yang, a former MIT postdoc, is the co-lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Photonics. The paper’s senior authors are Peter So, director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBCR) and an MIT professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT and a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences. Boyden is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Yang Tan Collective, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

To make 3D devices with the necessary feature size, the researchers extended the concept of “implosion fabrication,” which Boyden’s lab developed in 2018, to create a new variant called “implosion carving.” 

including Prof. @eboyden3, who holds a joint appointment in Media Arts and Sciences (the academic program at the Media Lab) and @mcgovernmit, have developed a technique called “implosion carving.”