High-Resolution Structuring of Silica-Based Nanocomposites for the Fabrication of Transparent Multicomponent Glasses with Adjustable Properties.

Silicate-based multicomponent glasses are of high interest for technical applications due to their tailored properties, such as an adaptable refractive index or coefficient of thermal expansion. However, the production of complex structured parts is associated with high effort, since glass components are usually shaped from high-temperature melts with subsequent mechanical or chemical postprocessing. Here for the first time the fabrication of binary and ternary multicomponent glasses using doped nanocomposites based on silica nanoparticles and photocurable metal oxide precursors as part of the binder matrix is presented. The doped nanocomposites are structured in high resolution using UV-casting and additive manufacturing techniques, such as stereolithography and two-photon lithography. Subsequently, the composites are thermally converted into transparent glass. By incorporating titanium oxide, germanium oxide, or zirconium dioxide into the silicate glass network, multicomponent glasses are fabricated with an adjustable refractive index n between 1.4584-1.4832 and an Abbe number V of 53.85-61.13. It is further demonstrated that by incorporating 7 wt% titanium oxide, glasses with ultralow thermal expansion can be fabricated with so far unseen complexity. These novel materials enable for the first time high-precision lithographic structuring of multicomponent silica glasses with applications from optics and photonics, semiconductors as well as sensors.