Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. T2394484, 52321006, T2394480, et al.), the team led by Professor Yanlin Song from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a printable meta-assembly strategy for micro-nano synergistic optical metamaterials, making a breakthrough in the scalable fabrication and precise integration of multi-scale optical metamaterials. Their study, entitled “Printable meta-assemblies enable synergetic colouration”, was published in Nature on April 22, 2026.

[Article] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10408-8

Optical metamaterials underpin technological advances in optical imaging, computing, communications, and green energy. Yet their fabrication faces two major bottlenecks. On the one hand, most artificial optical systems are confined to a single scale, resulting in limited functionality and poor tunability; on the other hand, the production relies heavily on high-precision processes like photolithography, which suffer from low efficiency, high cost, and inability to realize large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.

This work demonstrates a microscale hemispherical unit composed of periodic nanoscale lattices, which can couple multi-scale optical responses in a single structure. With the custom-built roll-to-roll additive nanoprinting setup, low-cost polymer nanomaterials can be rapidly printed into optical metamaterials with single-pixel resolution, breaking the long-standing trade-off between low cost, large-scale production and high precision. The study also reveals the mechanisms between multi-scale structures and optical properties, realizing precise control of bulk and interfacial dispersion. Through integrated printing, metamaterial units with different parameters can be patterned with high precision, empowering the cross-scale optical integration capability from nanoscale to macroscale.

This study provides a new pathway for customized optical devices, and has broad application prospects in photonic information, anti-counterfeiting imaging, precision medical sensing, green photonic energy and other frontier fields.

Figure. Overview of the printing strategy for scalable multi-scale optical metamaterials.