Electric‑field‑driven generative nanoimprinting for tilted metasurface nanostructures
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 25-Jan-2026 16:11 ET (25-Jan-2026 21:11 GMT/UTC)
Tilted metasurface nanostructures, with excellent physical properties and enormous application potential, pose an urgent need for manufacturing methods. Here, electric-field-driven generative-nanoimprinting technique is proposed. The electric field applied between the template and the substrate drives the contact, tilting, filling, and holding processes. By accurately controlling the introduced included angle between the flexible template and the substrate, tilted nanostructures with a controllable angle are imprinted onto the substrate, although they are vertical on the template. By flexibly adjusting the electric field intensity and the included angle, large-area uniform-tilted, gradient-tilted, and high-angle-tilted nanostructures are fabricated. In contrast to traditional replication, the morphology of the nanoimprinting structure is extended to customized control. This work provides a cost-effective, efficient, and versatile technology for the fabrication of various large-area tilted metasurface structures. As an illustration, a tilted nanograting with a high coupling efficiency is fabricated and integrated into augmented reality displays, demonstrating superior imaging quality.
One of the key steps in developing new materials is “property identification,” which has long relied on massive amounts of experimental data and expensive equipment, limiting research efficiency. A KAIST research team has introduced a new technique that combines “physical laws,” which govern deformation and interaction of materials and energy, with artificial intelligence. This approach allows for rapid exploration of new materials even under data-scarce conditions and provides a foundation for accelerating design and verification across multiple engineering fields, including materials, mechanics, energy, and electronics.
KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced on the 2nd of October that Professor Seunghwa Ryu’s research group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Jae Hyuk Lim’s group at Kyung Hee University (President Jinsang Kim) and Dr. Byungki Ryu at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (President Namkyun Kim), proposed a new method that can accurately determine material properties with only limited data. The method uses Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML), which directly incorporates physical laws into the AI learning process.
Recent years have witnessed transformative changes brought about by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with billions of parameters for the realization of high accuracy, proposing high demand for the advanced and AI chip to solve these AI tasks efficiently and powerfully. Rapid progress has been made in the field of advanced chips recently, such as the development of photonic computing, the advancement of the quantum processors, the boost of the biomimetic chips, and so on. Designs tactics of the advanced chips can be conducted with elaborated consideration of materials, algorithms, models, architectures, and so on. Though a few reviews present the development of the chips from their unique aspects, reviews in the view of the latest design for advanced and AI chips are few. Here, the newest development is systematically reviewed in the field of advanced chips. First, background and mechanisms are summarized, and subsequently most important considerations for co-design of the software and hardware are illustrated. Next, strategies are summed up to obtain advanced and AI chips with high excellent performance by taking the important information processing steps into consideration, after which the design thought for the advanced chips in the future is proposed. Finally, some perspectives are put forward.
Recently, the iGaN Laboratory led by Professor Haiding Sun at the School of Microelectronics, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), together with a global collaborative team from Wuhan University, Zhejiang University and University of Cambridge, has successfully developed the first miniaturized ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer and realized on-chip spectral imaging. Based on a novel gallium nitride (GaN) cascaded photodiode architecture and integrated with deep neural network (DNN) algorithms, the device achieves high-precision spectral detection and high-resolution multispectral imaging. With a response speed on the nanosecond scale, it sets a new world record for the fastest reported miniaturized spectrometer. The work was published online in Nature Photonics on September 26, 2025.