Maskless fabrication of plasmonic metasurfaces in polymer film using a spatial light modulator

We demonstrate a high-speed optical technique to fabricate plasmonic metasurfaces in a polymer film. The technique is based on a programmable spatial light modulator, which is used to spatially control the photoreduction sites of gold ions in a polyvinyl alcohol film doped with a gold precursor. After irradiation, annealing was used to induce the growth of nanoparticles, producing plasmonic microstructures. Using a 473 nm excitation wavelength, microscopic plasmonic gratings, and meta-atom arrays with arbitrary orientations, an effective nanostructure size of ∼700 nm and constituent nanoparticles with average size of ∼37 nm were created. The technique enables a cost-effective and straightforward light-based approach to fabricate plasmonic metasurfaces with tunable properties.