FLOW work published in Nature

Our FLOW colleagues Wenhai Lei and Shervin Bagheri have with collaborators published a paper in Nature:

Optofluidic three-dimensional microfabrication and nanofabrication. Nature (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10033-x
Three-dimensional micro- and nanofabrication has long been limited by materials: while existing techniques can print incredibly fine structures, they typically only work with a narrow class of polymers. This work overcomes that bottleneck by showing how fluid mechanics—carefully controlled at the microscale—can be used as a universal assembly tool.

The key idea is to use convective flows generated from high-temperature gradients to transport and assemble particles inside tiny 3D templates. A focused laser creates local temperature gradients, which in turn generate strong and highly controllable fluid motion. These flows guide nanoparticles—metals, oxides, diamond, quantum dots—into complex three-dimensional shapes with remarkable precision.