Professor Min Qiu’s group at Westlake University has developed a wafer-scale silicon carbide (SiC) meta-optic platform for high-power, multi-beam laser processing. The paper, titled “Wafer-scale silicon carbide meta-optic platform for robust multi-beam laser processing,” was published in PhotoniX. Postdoctoral researcher Boqu Chen is the paper’s first author.
High-power lasers are widely used in welding, cutting, and additive manufacturing. Splitting a laser beam across multiple processing sites offers a straightforward way to increase throughput, provided that each beam delivers enough energy for the task. Conventional systems tend to become bulkier and more difficult to align as additional processing heads are introduced. Higher laser powers place greater demands on the power-handling capability and thermal management of optical components. The challenge is to meet these demands while maintaining precise control over individual beams in a compact system.
The team’s design pairs a SiC diffractive optical element (DOE) with a SiC metalens array. The DOE splits the incoming beam into multiple channels, and a relay lens conditions the beams before each is focused by its corresponding metalens. The high thermal conductivity of SiC facilitates heat conduction away from the illuminated region, helping to mitigate localized heat accumulation. Its high refractive index enables phase control through micro- and nanostructures. Each metalens can be designed with its own phase profile, allowing the focusing properties to be tailored to individual channels. To fabricate the arrays, the team combined step-and-repeat nanoimprint lithography with hard-mask pattern transfer. Once a high-resolution master template has been made, its pattern can be replicated to produce wafer-scale arrays of centimeter-scale metalenses, avoiding repeated electron-beam writing of each array.
The platform was tested by processing stainless steel with four beams simultaneously. Both stationary processing and line scanning were demonstrated under continuous-wave laser irradiation, with several hundred watts of total laser power incident on the DOE. These experiments show how wafer-scale SiC optics can be used for high-power parallel processing. By combining beam splitting and individual focusing with a scalable fabrication process, the work offers a route toward more compact multi-beam laser processing systems.
Paper link：https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s43074-026-00294-8#citeas
