On Tuesday, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) announced a new 3D printing technology capable of creating intricately detailed structures at the nanometer scale with unprecedented speed.

The process, called two-photon lithography (TPL), works by tracing a finely focused laser beam through a pool of resin. As the beam's focal point—just two photons wide—pulses into the liquid, the resin hardens on that point and leaves behind a solid structure. As a demonstration of the printer's capabilities, researchers printed a 285-micrometer-long Indycar replica. It's just larger than a few strands of hair.

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Why a race car? Jan Torgersen, project assistant at TU Vienna's Institute of Materials Science and Technology, says "It just fits high-speed printing."

Although high resolution has always been a major strength of TPL, as objects are printed nanometers at a time, speed has not. Previous technologies, such as the one German research institute Laser Zentrum Hannover developed, trudged along at a rate of millimeters per second. According to Torgersen, his team's method can print at rates of meters per second, which amounts to a thousandfold increase.

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This speed increase comes from the development of a specialized, fast-reacting resin, and a system of tuned mirrors that guide the laser pulses through the liquid. Previous TPL setups used a feedback system to control the mirrors that would check to make sure the resin had hardened and that the mirrors were properly aligned before shooting each pulse. Torgersen's team instead used a preprogrammed set of delays, which kept the mirrors in constant motion, increasing the pulse speed and therefore the printing speed. It wasn't easy: Without feedback control, researchers had to fine-tune the delays between the movements of the mirrors while ensuring that the laser pulses could keep up. "This synchronization of the switching of the laser and the movement of the mirrors was thus very tricky," Torgersen says.

A nanoscopic Indycar is a nice demo, but Torgersen says the real applications of being able to quickly fabricate high-precision nanoscale objects lies in biomedical engineering—for instance, creating scaffolds upon which to grow human tissue in the lab. "Depending on the geometry of the scaffold and the type of cell, custom biological tissue can be made," he says.

A medical breakthrough like that is still a few years down the line, Torgersen says. TPL requires a femtosecond laser like those used in eye surgery, which typically costs in excess of $75,000. And commercially available resins can't harden fast enough to keep up with the TU Vienna–developed system. "I'm sure that the commercialization will come with the offer and demand of femtosecond lasers," he says. For now, we'll just have to admire race cars that are smaller than a common dust mite.

What do you think?