Electron and x-ray focused beam-induced cross-linking in liquids: Toward rapid continuous 3D nanoprinting and interfacing using soft materials

Published

September 15, 2020

Author(s)

Tanya Gupta, Evgheni Strelcov, Glenn Holland, Joshua D. Schumacher, Yang Yang, Mandy Esch, Vladimir Aksyuk, Patrick Zeller, Matteo Amati, Luca Gregoratti, Andrei Kolmakov

Abstract

Additive fabrication of biocompatible 3D structures out of liquid hydrogel solutions has become pivotal technology for tissue engineering, soft robotics, biosensing, drug delivery etc. Electron and X-ray lithography are well suited to pattern nanoscopic features out of dry polymers, however, the direct additive manufacturing in hydrogel solutions with these powerful tools is hard to implement due to vacuum incompatibility of hydrated samples. In this work, we resolve this principal impediment and demonstrate a technique for in-liquid hydrogel 3D- sculpturing separating high vacuum instrumentation and volatile sample with ultrathin molecularly impermeable membranes transparent to low energy electrons and soft X-rays. Using either scanning focused electron or synchrotron soft X-ray beams, the principle of the technique, particularities of the in-liquid crosslinking mechanism and factors affecting the ultimate gel feature size are described and validated through the comparison of experiments and simulations. The potential of this technique is demonstrated on few practical examples such as encapsulation of nanoparticles and live-cell as well as fabrication of mesoscopic 3D-hydrogel structures via modulation of the beam energy

Citation

ACS Nano

Volume

14

Issue

10

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.0c04266

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Keywords

electron beam, X-ray beam, hydrogel, crosslinking, 3D printing

Citation

Gupta, T. , Strelcov, E. , Holland, G. , Schumacher, J. , Yang, Y. , Esch, M. , Aksyuk, V. , Zeller, P. , Amati, M. , Gregoratti, L. and Kolmakov, A. (2020), Electron and x-ray focused beam-induced cross-linking in liquids: Toward rapid continuous 3D nanoprinting and interfacing using soft materials, ACS Nano, [online], https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.0c04266, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=927702 (Accessed October 7, 2025)