On 16 September 2026, Francesca Bragheri gave an online presentation on the technology behind the nanoSCAN project in her Laserlab-Europe talk “Femtosecond laser fabricated glass photonic integrated circuits for microscopy”.

Watch the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO9BubQx3B0

Summary: Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) enables resolution beyond the diffraction limit with low phototoxicity, but conventional implementations rely on bulky, complex optics.
In this talk, femtosecond laser micromachining (FLM) will be presented as a versatile technology for fabricating three-dimensional integrated photonic circuits in glass for SIM. FLM enables direct writing of buried waveguides, couplers and interferometric structures with micrometric precision, while selective chemical etching (FLICE) adds reflective micro-optical elements. On-chip thermal phase shifters provide fast, mechanical-movement-free control of the interference pattern needed for SIM reconstruction.

Device architectures ranging from compact two-output interferometers to multi-beam circuits generating 2D and 3D interference patterns will be discussed, showing how these glass chips can turn conventional widefield microscopes into compact, reconfigurable SIM platforms — pointing toward alignment-free, field-deployable super-resolution imaging.