Quantum Printing: Techniques and Applications

• Quantum printing is a multifaceted concept that encompasses deterministic heterogeneous assembly, additive manufacturing, and state imprinting to embed quantum functionality into diverse substrates.
• In integrated photonics, transfer printing employs pick-and-place techniques to deterministically mount pre-fabricated quantum emitters onto CMOS-compatible circuits with sub-100 nm precision.
• Additive manufacturing and state imprinting extend the scope by enabling the direct fabrication of quantum hardware and the transfer of quantum states into materials for next-generation device functionalities.

Searching arXiv for recent and foundational papers on “quantum printing” and closely related transfer-printing / additive-manufacturing / structured-light imprinting work. to=arxiv_search 天天彩票中奖{"query":"\"Quantum Printing\" OR \"transfer printing\" quantum photonics additive manufacturing structured light", "max_results": 10, "sort_by": "submittedDate"} to=arxiv_search 大发快三官网 全民彩票天天送"query":"(Katsumi et al., 2018) OR (Osada et al., 2018) OR (Katsumi et al., 2018) OR (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025) OR (Liu et al., 23 May 2026) OR (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025) OR (Guymon et al., 7 Jan 2025) OR (Xu et al., 2023)", "max_results": 20, "sort_by": "relevance"} Quantum printing is a cross-disciplinary term used for several distinct operations in quantum science and engineering. In integrated photonics, it denotes transfer printing: the post-fabrication pick-and-place assembly of pre-fabricated quantum emitters or nanolasers onto completed photonic integrated circuits, including CMOS silicon photonic chips (Katsumi et al., 2018). In hardware engineering, it denotes additive manufacturing of quantum-device components such as ultrahigh-vacuum parts, ion traps, superconducting resonators, optics, and sensor structures (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025). In a different physical sense, it denotes the imprinting of quantum states from photons and phonons onto quantum matter, so that structured light or strain writes vortices, skyrmions, magnetization, or related collective excitations into a material (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025). A broader informational usage appears in quantum image processing and quantum-computing art tools, where visual information is encoded, processed, and retrieved through quantum states rather than deposited as a material pattern (Yan et al., 2020).

1. Conceptual scope

The literature does not use quantum printing in a single narrow sense. One usage is architectural and fabrication-oriented: quantum functionality is added to a completed substrate by deterministic heterogeneous assembly, especially through transfer printing of quantum photonic components (Katsumi et al., 2018). Another usage is manufacturing-oriented: additive manufacturing directly fabricates structures that carry quantum-relevant function, such as magnetic-field generation, ultrahigh-vacuum maintenance, photon collection, ion confinement, or low-loss microwave response (Saint et al., 2017). A third usage is dynamical and nonequilibrium: structured photons or phonons imprint quantum numbers into matter, so that phase, chirality, angular momentum, topology, or symmetry breaking are transferred into collective degrees of freedom (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025).

These usages share a common operational motif: quantum functionality is not merely observed but written, assembled, or imprinted into a target medium. The target may be a silicon photonic chip, a 3D-printed vacuum flange, a superconducting resonator, a magnetic thin film, or a quantum state representation of an image. This suggests that “printing” functions as an organizing concept for direct, spatially selective, post-design realization of quantum behavior, even though the underlying mechanisms differ substantially across subfields.

A recurring source of confusion is that some works use the term literally, as in transfer printing or additive manufacturing, whereas others use it to describe state transfer into matter or visual-information reconstruction. The distinction is explicit in the literature: quantum image processing is concerned with storing, processing, and retrieving images in quantum form rather than proposing a physical printer (Yan et al., 2020), while transfer-printed photonics and additively manufactured quantum hardware are explicitly fabrication technologies (Katsumi et al., 2018).

2. Transfer printing in quantum photonics

In quantum photonics, quantum printing most clearly denotes transfer printing of pre-fabricated III–V quantum devices onto independently fabricated photonic integrated circuits. The central motivation is that silicon photonics is scalable and CMOS-compatible but lacks a good deterministic single-photon source, whereas epitaxial InAs/GaAs quantum dots provide single photons with high purity and indistinguishability yet are difficult to integrate monolithically with silicon platforms (Katsumi et al., 2018). Transfer printing separates the fabrication steps: the quantum light source is fabricated independently, the photonic circuit is fabricated independently, and the two are assembled afterward in a pick-and-place step. This is important because assembly occurs after the entire CMOS process is completed, making the method compatible with CMOS back-end processing (Katsumi et al., 2018).

The transfer-printing workflow is mechanically simple but technologically consequential. A PDMS rubber stamp contacts a released nanostructure, is quickly peeled off to pick it up, then is aligned above the target waveguide and slowly peeled away to release it. The structure remains on the chip by van der Waals bonding. In the CMOS-chip single-photon-source demonstration, pickup and placement success were reported as nearly 100%, with alignment error < 100 nm (Katsumi et al., 2018). In the wire-waveguide platform, supplementary details report 1-µm-thick square bumps, peeling speed about 3 mm/s, transfer success probability about 70–80%, average placement error < 100 nm, and rotation error < 1 degree (Katsumi et al., 2018).

Three 2018 demonstrations establish the basic transfer-printed quantum-photonic paradigm. “Transfer-printed single photon sources coupled to wire waveguides” (Katsumi et al., 2018) used InAs/GaAs quantum dots embedded in photonic crystal nanobeam cavities printed onto glass-cladded wire waveguides. The architecture was designed for near-unity total single-photon coupling efficiency into the waveguide, with theoretical values including $\eta = 99.4\%$ at $d = 300$ nm, maximum possible $\beta = 99.7\%$, and theoretical total coupling $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$ in the Supplementary Information. Experimentally, the work reported $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$, $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$, total $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}}\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 63\%$, and antibunching with $g^{(2)}(0) = 0.23$. It also demonstrated two SPSs integrated onto one waveguide (Katsumi et al., 2018).

“Quantum-dot single-photon source on a CMOS silicon photonic chip integrated using transfer printing” (Katsumi et al., 2018) extended the same principle to a glass-clad silicon photonic waveguide processed by a CMOS foundry. The printed source was a GaAs photonic crystal nanobeam cavity containing a single layer of self-assembled InAs quantum dots, positioned above a 250 nm wide, 210 nm thick silicon waveguide buried in 2 μm of SiO$_2$ and covered by a glass layer with thickness tuned to $d = 350$ nm. Simulations gave a maximum $d = 300$0 at $d = 300$1 nm, while experimentally inferred values were $d = 300$2, $d = 300$3, and total $d = 300$4. Single-photon statistics yielded $d = 300$5, and temperature tuning showed Purcell-enhanced emission (Katsumi et al., 2018).

“Transfer-printed quantum-dot nanolasers on a silicon photonic circuit” (Osada et al., 2018) demonstrated that the same assembly strategy supports active on-chip lasing. A 1D photonic crystal nanocavity in a 200-nm-thick GaAs membrane containing six layers of InAs/GaAs QDs was printed above a CMOS-processed silicon waveguide with top oxide thinned to about 370 nm. Simulations indicated near-unity coupling efficiency exceeding 99% at that gap while preserving $d = 300$6, and experiments showed lasing through an S-shaped light-in/light-out curve, linewidth narrowing, clamping of spontaneous emission, and a threshold of about 3.5 $d = 300$7W. Waveguide coupling was verified from grating outcouplers, and the estimated cavity-waveguide coupling efficiency for the single printed nanolaser was 55%. The work also demonstrated repetitive transfer-printing of two QD nanolasers onto a single silicon waveguide, with resonances separated by about 10 nm, relevant to wavelength-division multiplexing (Osada et al., 2018).

Taken together, these studies define quantum printing in photonics as deterministic heterogeneous assembly after independent optimization. The principal advantages stated across the papers are independent source and circuit fabrication, foundry compatibility, deterministic placement of selected emitters, and dense integration of multiple quantum light sources on one circuit (Katsumi et al., 2018).

3. Additive manufacturing of quantum hardware

A broader engineering usage of quantum printing is additive manufacturing for advanced quantum technologies. The review “Additive Manufacturing for Advanced Quantum Technologies” (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025) frames this explicitly as the direct fabrication of quantum-hardware components, subsystems, and functional devices from digital designs. Its emphasis is strongest in quantum sensing, but it also covers quantum computing hardware, integrated photonics, optics, optomechanics, magnetic components, vacuum equipment, and atom–photon nodes. The review organizes the field around structural elements, vacuum components, transparent optics, and active components, and repeatedly stresses part consolidation, design freedom, rapid prototyping, and reduced SWAP—size, weight, and power (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025).

One canonical example is “3D-printed components for quantum devices” (Saint et al., 2017), which printed a centimetre-scale cylindrical atom-trap structure for a magneto-optical trap. The work quantified the value of three-dimensional current routing by comparing idealized 3D anti-Helmholtz loops with optimal planar loops. At equal power, the 3D configuration gave a field gradient larger by a factor of 7.37, and achieving the same gradient in the planar case would require 54.3× more power dissipation. The printed Al-Si10-Mg structure reached cold resistivity $d = 300$8 after heat treatment, remained ultrahigh-vacuum compatible for nine months with no detectable outgassing, and enabled $d = 300$9Rb MOT operation with atom numbers above $\beta = 99.7\%$0 at 4 mW, more than $\beta = 99.7\%$1 atoms above about 30 mW, and temperatures down to $\beta = 99.7\%$2 under molasses cooling (Saint et al., 2017).

In trapped-ion quantum information processing, “3D-Printed Micro Ion Trap Technology for Scalable Quantum Information Processing” (Xu et al., 2023) used two-photon polymerization with a 780 nm femtosecond laser to print a micro linear Paul trap, then metallized the scaffold with about a 1 µm gold layer. The device had four RF electrode pillars, total pillar height 300 µm, distance between opposing RF electrodes 200 µm, ion-to-RF-electrode distance 100 µm, and nine planar DC electrodes in a $\beta = 99.7\%$3 region. Single $\beta = 99.7\%$4 ions were trapped with radial secular frequencies from 2.09 MHz to 24.15 MHz, reaching $\beta = 99.7\%$5 near the theoretical limit 0.911 for the stated parameter. At 21.29 MHz after Doppler cooling, the average motional occupation was $\beta = 99.7\%$6, and high-fidelity single-qubit Rabi oscillations were demonstrated with fitted Rabi frequency $\beta = 99.7\%$7 kHz (Xu et al., 2023).

Additive manufacturing has also reached the microwave regime relevant to superconducting quantum circuits. “Liquid metal printing for superconducting circuits” (Kreiner et al., 12 Nov 2025) showed that liquid-metal micro-pipette printing using EGaInSn can fabricate superconducting lumped-element resonators with single-photon internal quality factors approaching $\beta = 99.7\%$8. In the single-photon regime, the best devices consistently showed $\beta = 99.7\%$9, and one silicon device reached values approaching $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$0. The work explicitly argued that the technique allows locally adding metal structures without disturbing preexisting circuit elements, but also documented a major limitation: thermal cycling can cause roughening, retraction, line breaks, or detachment, likely linked to a tin-pest-like phase transformation in the alloy (Kreiner et al., 12 Nov 2025).

Vacuum engineering provides another strong example. “Exploiting complex 3D-printed surface structures for portable quantum technologies” (Cooper et al., 2 Jul 2025) used laser powder bed fusion of Ti-6Al-4V to print fine surface textures into vacuum flanges, then coated them with V-Zr-Ti NEG film of about 2 μm thickness. The central result was that the patterned getter-coated surface pumped residual gas 3.8 times faster than an equivalent flat area, with simulations predicting up to a ten-fold increase in pumping rate for realistic geometries. The approach targets atom interferometers, atomic clocks, gravimeters, and magnetometers, where passive pumping is a major systems bottleneck (Cooper et al., 2 Jul 2025).

This body of work suggests that additive quantum printing is not merely a rapid-prototyping convenience. In the cited literature it is a route to field-generating structures, vacuum-function engineering, optical coupling structures, ion confinement hardware, and low-loss superconducting microwave devices (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025).

4. Quantum dots as printable functional media

A distinct branch of quantum printing uses quantum dots themselves as the printable active medium. “Full-Spectrum Flexible Color Printing at the Diffraction Limit” (Richner et al., 2016) demonstrated electrohydrodynamic rapid NanoDrip printing of controlled amounts of red, green, and blue colloidal quantum dots at 250 nm resolution, described as the diffraction limit for optical microscopy. The platform used a conductive pulled-glass nozzle with opening diameter 1000–1100 nm, operated at 225 V, nozzle–substrate spacing about 5 μm, droplet generation frequency about 100 Hz, and stage speed range 1.3 μm/s to 141 μm/s. The deposited intensity was controlled by substrate translation speed rather than droplet size, with the calibration

$\eta\beta = 99.2\%$1

where $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$2 is the RGB value from 0 to 255 and $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$3 is the stage velocity in $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$4 (Richner et al., 2016).

In that work, the printed inks were CdSe-CdS-ZnS core-shell-shell nanocrystals for red and green and CdS-ZnS core-shell nanocrystals with a composition gradient for blue. Their emission peaks were 625 nm, 538 nm, and 461 nm, respectively. Because the printed image was formed directly from quantum-dot photoluminescence rather than dyes or plasmonic structural color, the paper treated the narrow emission spectrum of the dots as the key mechanism enabling a color gamut exceeding standard RGB (sRGB). The demonstration included variable-intensity gradients, 256 speed levels, and a photorealistic printed image of a colorful parrot with size 94 × 125 μm and pixel size 250 nm (Richner et al., 2016).

Where the NanoDrip work used ensembles of colloidal quantum dots as a printable colorant, “Deterministic printing and heterointegration of single colloidal quantum dot photon sources” (Guymon et al., 7 Jan 2025) pushed quantum printing to the single-particle level. The paper introduced an electrohydrodynamic regime governed not primarily by droplet ejection but by nanoscale dielectrophoresis, which selectively extracts a single highly polarizable QD from the meniscus and deposits it onto a target substrate. The materials choice was central: colossal-shell CdSe/CdS QDs with 80 monolayers of CdS shell and designed average radius about 36 ± 3.1 nm, dispersed in 1:1 octane:hexadecane, so that the particle polarizability strongly exceeded that of the apolar medium (Guymon et al., 7 Jan 2025).

The interfacial-force model and the dielectrophoretic-force model were given explicitly. The dielectrophoretic force was written as

$\eta\beta = 99.2\%$5

with the Clausius–Mossotti factor

$\eta\beta = 99.2\%$6

Using measured interfacial parameters—surface tension 25.3 ± 0.3 mN/m, QD-film surface free energy 30.8 ± 1.0 mN/m, and resulting interfacial tension 6.9 ± 1.0 mN/m—plus COMSOL-based field simulations at 2 kV, the authors estimated $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$7 and a minimum QD radius of about 32 nm to overcome the extraction barrier (Guymon et al., 7 Jan 2025).

Experimentally, arrays of 100 attempt sites with 5 µm spacing were printed using a printhead internal diameter of ~5 µm, frequency 1 kHz, and hold times 0.5–2 s. The best-performing condition was 900 V, 2 s, and the estimated overall single-particle yield was ~50%. Optical measurements confirmed preservation of quantum-emitter function: a printed QD on SiN showed an emission peak at 624 nm, FWHM ~21 nm, and antibunching with example $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$8 and mean $\eta\beta = 99.2\%$9 across printed single QDs. The same method was used to place a single QD into a horseshoe-shaped SiN nanophotonic cavity, where the cavity-integrated system retained $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$0 (Guymon et al., 7 Jan 2025).

These two quantum-dot literatures define two related but nonidentical meanings of quantum printing: printing with quantum materials and printing individual quantum emitters into photonic structures.

5. Imprinting quantum states into matter

A conceptually different use of quantum printing is the imprinting of quantum states from photons or phonons onto quantum matter. The review “Quantum Printing” (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025) defines the term as the transfer of phase, chirality, angular momentum, topology, or symmetry breaking from structured fields into coherent many-body systems. The review organizes the subject into charged fluids—including metals, superconductors, and Hall fluids—and neutral systems such as magnets and excitons. The core mechanisms include vector potential coupling, the inverse Faraday effect, phonon-mediated angular momentum transfer, strain-induced gauge fields in Dirac materials, and torques on localized spins (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025).

One central example is vortex printing in superconductors, where the complex superconducting order parameter serves as a particularly natural target for phase imprinting. The review writes the relation

$\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$1

or equivalently through the vector potential,

$\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$2

to show how the longitudinal magnetic-field component of structured light can induce vorticity in the supercurrent. The same review discusses inverse Faraday magnetization in metals, optical control in Hall fluids, excitonic magnetization in bilayer systems, and the acoustic inverse Faraday effect in Dirac materials, where the strain field acts as an emergent gauge field (Aeppli et al., 20 Sep 2025).

In magnets, the concept has been developed into an explicit printing protocol using structured terahertz light. “Quantum Printing: Laguerre-Gaussian Beam Induced Topological Magnetic Textures” (Liu et al., 23 May 2026) considered a collinear ferromagnetic thin film driven by a structured THz Laguerre-Gaussian pulse characterized by spin angular momentum $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$3, orbital angular momentum $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$4, and radial order $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$5. The magnetization evolves under the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation

$\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$6

with only isotropic exchange retained; there is no Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction, no built-in chirality, and no interfacial anisotropy (Liu et al., 23 May 2026).

The topological charge density was defined as

$\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$7

with total charge

$\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$8

Micromagnetic simulations on an $\eta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 72\%$9 grid with $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$0, 1 THz pulses, and beam diameter $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$1 showed that different choices of $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$2 generate different metastable textures, including skyrmions, merons / fractional topological defects, domain-wall-like line defects, multi-ring and multi-core textures, and left-right antisymmetric textures (Liu et al., 23 May 2026).

The paper treated this as printing because the beam functions as a programmable optical template: its spatial structure determines where precession begins, exchange spreads the disturbance, and damping relaxes the state into a persistent magnetic texture. The authors emphasized several comparative advantages: the method does not require interfacial anisotropy or bulk chirality, does not rely on current-driven torques, and is presented as a non-thermal pathway rather than thermal quenching (Liu et al., 23 May 2026). This suggests a materials-agnostic route to topological texture generation, especially relevant to magnonics and ultrafast magnetic writing.

6. Informational extensions, limitations, and future directions

A broader, explicitly non-fabrication interpretation appears in quantum image processing. “A Critical and Moving-Forward View on Quantum Image Processing” (Yan et al., 2020) defines QIMP as an emerging field devoted to storing, processing, and retrieving visual information from images and video using quantum mechanical systems. It distinguishes QIMP from quantum imaging in quantum optics and focuses instead on image representation, image operations, security, retrieval, and quantum hardware and software ecosystems. In this literature, the closest relation to quantum printing is not physical deposition but reproducing visual information from quantum states (Yan et al., 2020).

The paper gives the NEQR representation explicitly: $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$3 with the grayscale value written in binary as

$\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$4

For an $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$5-pixel grayscale image, the paper states that NEQR requires

$\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$6

qubits. It also stresses a central limitation: in many quantum image models, retrieval is probabilistic, unlike deterministic classical access. This makes QIMP relevant to quantum printing only in an informational or metaphorical sense (Yan et al., 2020).

A still more explicit metaphorical extension appears in “Quantum Brush: A quantum computing-based tool for digital painting” (Ferreira et al., 1 Sep 2025). The paper states that the system is not “printing” in the conventional sense of physically depositing ink or fabricating a printed object, but interprets the workflow as a broader digital-art analogue: user strokes are translated into quantum algorithms, executed on a QPU, and the quantum output is mapped back to visible image changes. The tool defines four brushes—Aquarela, Heisenbrush, Smudge, and Collage—and is designed for NISQ devices, with demonstrations on IQM’s Sirius without error mitigation (Ferreira et al., 1 Sep 2025).

Across the literature, several limitations recur. In transfer-printed photonics, the main constraints include fabrication imperfections, alignment error, and the intrinsic trade-off between tighter cavity–waveguide coupling and lower $\beta_{\mathrm{exp}} = 87\%$7, which can increase threshold power (Osada et al., 2018). In additively manufactured hardware, the review literature emphasizes surface roughness, porosity, outgassing, material compatibility, process reproducibility, and long-term stability as continuing bottlenecks (Wang et al., 14 Mar 2025). In liquid-metal superconducting printing, thermal-cycle instability is currently decisive (Kreiner et al., 12 Nov 2025). In structured-light imprinting, the proposed experimental route points toward intense THz sources, near-field probes, nanoantenna arrays, or metasurfaces to achieve the needed field concentration and spatial resolution (Liu et al., 23 May 2026). In QIMP, the major bottlenecks remain probabilistic readout, qubit-resource inefficiency in some models, and the lack of full hardware workflows including preparation and measurement interfaces (Yan et al., 2020).

The collective direction of the field is therefore not a single technology but a family of strategies for writing quantum function into matter, devices, or information-bearing states. In the narrowest sense, quantum printing is already a practical method for heterogeneous photonic integration and increasingly for additive quantum hardware. In the broadest sense, it is a general program of translating structured quantum resources—materials, fields, phases, or optical modes—into designed physical or informational outcomes (Katsumi et al., 2018).