Light-Driven Nanonetwork Assembly of Gold Nanoparticles via 3D Printing for Optical Sensors

Additive manufacturing known as 3D printing has transformed the material landscape, with intricate structures and rapid prototyping for modern production. While nanoscale 3D printing has made significant progress, a critical challenge remains in the rapid, high-throughput tailoring of complex nanostructures. Here, we present a 3D printing-facilitated, light-driven assembly technology for rapid surface patterning consisting of complex particle nanonetworks with balanced fabrication resolution and processing scalability. This innovative approach seamlessly integrates top-down 3D printing (i.e., fused deposition modeling (FDM)) of digitally encoded patterns with bottom-up nanoparticle assembly (i.e., plasmonic light-driven techniques). The manufacturing-structure relationship of the generated nanonetworks within macroscale cylindrical patterning is investigated through programmatic modulation of critical processing parameters, including polymer rheology, chain-mode plasmonic resonances, nanoparticle dimensions, and peak optical intensity. The capacity of nanoscale 3D printing with optical adjustment can not only achieve high-resolution patterning but also offer precise control over large-scale geometries for applications in optical sensing.