Engineers at the University of Utah have shown off a 3D printing approach that sidesteps one of the format’s persistent weaknesses: the leaky seams left behind when an object is built up slice by slice. Rather than stacking layers, the technique relies on a nanoscale “mask” that bends laser light into a holographic version of the target shape, hardening the print material into a solid form in a single pass. The whole operation runs in roughly 20 seconds, a sharp departure from the hours that competing laser-driven methods can demand.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team showed that the process could turn out multiple objects one after another, much like items moving along a conveyor belt. The work was directed by Rajesh Menon, a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Price College of Engineering, working alongside lab member Dajun Lin. Using the method, the group printed microtubule assemblies with individual channels measuring as little as 6 micrometers across, then put the structures through toughness testing and demonstrated that they could draw liquid along their length through capillary action.
Borrowing from Chip-Making, Then Adding a Dimension
The concept grows out of photolithography, the patterning process behind microchips, reimagined for three-dimensional space. The prints use a material called SU-8, a photolithography staple built from long, thread-like polymers. When laser light strikes those molecular strands, they knit together and set; the portions left in shadow can afterward be rinsed off, revealing the intended form.
Conventional 2D photolithography defines that form with an opaque mask that stops the laser from touching areas meant to stay soft. Because the light only has to reach the surface, this arrangement works cleanly in two dimensions. Extending it into a third dimension is harder: the laser now has to travel through the material itself to solidify a pocket of space within it, and since SU-8 isn’t perfectly clear, it bends the beam off course and smears the result.
Menon’s group got around that blurring with a mask made from a nanopatterned lens engineered to counteract the material’s light-scattering behavior. Positioned in front of the laser, it funnels the beam’s energy solely into the region destined to become the finished object. With it, the researchers built intricate microstructures reaching aspect ratios as steep as 120 to 1.
Not Quite 3D, Yet
Menon characterizes the output as “extended 2D” rather than genuine 3D. The pieces do have length, width, and height, but the team can only dictate the geometry of the first two; the third is essentially stretched out as far as it will go. That constraint is why the method suits lattice-style microtubule arrays so well, since those designs pack fine detail into two dimensions and simply project it through the depth.
“The mask is working like a cookie cutter, stamping a complex shape out of thick dough,” Menon said. “The laser is ‘baking’ the dough on the inside at the same time, so the resulting shape is physically tough.”
Across several lattice geometries, the printed microtubules held up under a range of compression tests and reliably moved liquid by capillary action. The team is now pushing to make the technique capable of true three-dimensional prints.
The paper, “Single-exposure holographic lithography of ultra-high aspect-ratio microstructures,” ran in Nature Communications on June 4. Brian Baker of the Utah Nanofab contributed as a co-author, and the research drew support from the National Science Foundation and the University of Utah.
Converging on Layer-free Fabrication
The Utah team targets a clear gap in additive manufacturing: layer-by-layer building is slow and leaves weak seams where slices meet, limiting parts that must hold liquid or bear load. By collapsing the build into a single holographic exposure, Menon’s lab aims to deliver seam-free, tough microstructures in seconds rather than hours, for now within its “extended 2D” niche.
That ambition places it among a wave of comparable efforts. In May 2026, researchers at Tsinghua University unveiled a sub-second volumetric printing method using holographic light fields, dubbed DISH, reporting a maximum volume printing rate near 333 mm³/s at exposure times around 0.6 seconds, while acknowledging hurdles such as speckle noise and reduced axial resolution from single-side illumination.
A team from Beihang University and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, led by Dr. Huiyuan Wang, took a different route with a method they call SVIP-VAM, which cuts the number of light projections needed to build complex parts from more than a thousand to as few as 15 and trims pattern-computation time from over an hour to roughly seven minutes.
The common thread is a bet that light-shaped, layer-free fabrication can outrun layered printing. Utah’s contribution stands out for its focus on seam-free toughness and extreme aspect ratios. The open question is whether it can make the leap to full 3D.
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Featured image shows the researchers demonstrated multiple different lattice patterns for their microtubule arrays. Image via Menon Lab, University of Utah.
