Generalised optical printing of photocurable metal chalcogenides

Abstract

Optical three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques attract tremendous attention due to the capability of maskless additive manufacturing, enabling cost-effective and straightforward creation of patterned architectures. Despite their potential as alternatives to classical lithography, the printable materials produced by these processes are restricted to photocurable resins, limiting the functioning of printed products and their application regions. Herein, we report a generalised direct optical printing technique to obtain functional metal chalcogenides via digital light processing. We developed universally applicable photocurable chalcogenidometallate inks that could be directly used to create 2D patterns or 3D architectures of various sizes and shapes. Our method may be used to make a wide variety of functional metal chalcogenides for compound semiconductors as well as 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our process that the micro-scale thermoelectric generator with tens of patterned semiconductors was fabricated and evaluated. Our approach shows potential for simple and cost-effective architecturing of functional inorganic materials.