Scientific discoveries have always been the main driving forces behind many engineering innovations. In particular, the emerging field of electromagnetic and mechanical metamaterials offers fundamentally new capabilities in creating non-naturally occurring properties via rational designs at deep micro-/nanoscales. However, despite their potential to have a transformative impact on many applications, especially photonic devices, the lack of capable advanced micro and nanomanufacturing technologies imposes serious constraints which impede the successful translation of these exciting scientific discoveries into commercially viable products and applications. The wide gap between scientific research and the development of advanced manufacturing technologies poses many significant challenges in fulfilling the growing demand for photonic devices manufactured with increasingly fine details but without undermining their overall scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. For example, three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies still face the inherent speed-accuracy trade-off, which limits the overall scalability in manufacturing sophisticated 3D parts containing microscale and nanoscale features. Thus, this dissertation aims to bridge the gap between scientific discoveries and micro and nanomanufacturing methods to further facilitate the scalable manufacturing of multiscale photonic structures and devices.

In this dissertation, hybrid top-down electro-beam lithography and bottom-up vapor--liquid--solid method are first integrated together to fabricate electromagnetic metamaterials comprising two-dimensional (2D) indium tin oxide nanorod arrays (ITO-NRAs), which support strong localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) at infrared frequencies. By exploiting the strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with induced electric dipoles at LSPRs in the ITO-NRAs, artificial tunable polariton bandgaps at infrared frequencies are investigated theoretically and experimentally. A theoretical model is first developed to understand the coupled phenomena underlying the unique characteristics of plasmon--polariton bandgaps. With high-degree control of the geometries of the ITO-NRAs, it has been experimentally demonstrated that controlling the near-field interactions among the neighboring electric dipoles allows for manipulation of the collective polariton modes.

To further increase the manufacturing speed and scalability of metamaterials with sophisticated nanostructures, nanoimprinting and nanotransfer printing methods are integrated to accomplish the highly scalable nanomanufacturing of a metasurface comprising U-shaped nanowire resonators (UNWRs). This UNWR metasurface supports reconfigurable ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic hybridization of 2D artificial magnetic dipoles at optical frequencies, and its optical properties can be substantially manipulated by controlling the spatial and orientational arrangement of the magnetic dipoles. In addition, because of the existence of free-standing prongs, these nanoscale UNWRs support co-localized electromagnetic resonance at optical frequencies and mechanical resonance at GHz frequencies. The coherent coupling of these two distinct resonances manifests a strong optical force, which allows the UNWRs to dynamically change their optical properties upon the incident light. The all-optical modulation at the frequency at 1.8 GHz has thus been demonstrated experimentally using this UNWR metasurface.

Furthermore, a time- and cost-effective single-photon projection micro-stereolithography (PmicroSL) method is studied to accomplish high-throughput 3D printing of customized photonic devices. The grayscale photopolymerization process and the meniscus equilibrium post-curing process are integrated to completely remove the pixelated surface roughness from the PmicroSL technique while maintaining a high fabrication speed at 24.54 mm3/h. We have demonstrated the capability to 3D-print optical elements, such as aspheric imaging lenses, with deep subwavelength surface smoothness (< 7 nm), sub-voxel-scale precision (< 5 microm), and high reproducibility, offering a highly reliable solution for the rapid prototyping of customized photonic devices with micro-/ nanoscale features from the optimized design. Besides, the light-trapping characteristic of diatom frustules has been investigated numerically and experimentally. We have discovered that placing the diatom frustules on the surface of light-absorption materials can strongly enhance optical absorption over the visible spectrum and thus increase the efficiency of the energy conversion of photovoltaic devices.

Through these works, several approaches have been studied to address the challenges with the scalable manufacturing of 3D photonic devices, and these efforts will benefit a broad range of fields, such as photonics, mechanics, energy, and healthcare.