Implosion carving shrinks 3D-printed structures to 1/ 2,000th of their original volume, for mass production of nanoscale photonic chips

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1127847

"laser carves precise vacancy patterns into photosensitized hydrogel at macroscopic scale, soaking gel in ionic solution, apply supercritical drying, shrinks uniformly until internal features <100 nm, smaller than the wavelength of visible light, allowing the resulting devices to bend and manipulate light to perform complex optical computations... To demonstrate its potential, the team successfully created an optical neural network that can perform digit classification at the speed of light with near-zero electrical power"