Breaking quantum barriers with inkjet printing

Jul 19, 2025

Inside the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds, University of Washington (UW) researchers use next-generation methods to make manufacturing processes more environmentally friendly, reducing carbon footprints while improving scalability and efficiency. And thanks to a special inkjet printer — the first of its kind in the world — the UW and its partners in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand (IMOD) have started making quantum hardware with these sustainable techniques.

October 2025

Read the latest paper about this effort here. 

The Testbeds are an open-access lab facility that accelerates innovation in advanced manufacturing and climate technologies, where researchers from startups and global corporations as well as UW scholars can rent time on world-class equipment. Its technical director is IMOD faculty member J. Devin MacKenzie, the Washington Research Foundation (WRF) Professor of Clean Energy and an associate professor of materials science & engineering (MSE) and mechanical engineering (ME) at the UW, whose group plays a key role in IMOD’s Heterointegration Research Theme (RT-2). They’re experts in additive manufacturing: a set of techniques that can broadly be described as 3D printing, but include inkjet printing, screen printing, and roll-to-roll coating — all known for their relative efficiency and scalability in terms of wasted materials and power needs.

“Additive manufacturing is key for heterointegration because we can combine different materials, as well as different types of chips and technologies like lasers, LEDs, and sensors,” says MacKenzie. “The tools at the Testbeds enable us to create devices that would be impossible to make with conventional manufacturing techniques.”

University of Washington researchers Greg Guymon (left) and Professor J. Devin MacKenzie (right) inspect the electrohydrodynamic inkjet printer at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds.

When it comes to IMOD projects, UW ME doctoral student Greg Guymon is the lead researcher for the MacKenzie Group. Guymon uses the Testbeds’ high-resolution electrohydrodynamic printer that applies electric fields to precisely deposit individual quantum dots: semiconducting nanoparticles that are over a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, with the volume of each printed droplet measured in attoliters — quintillionths of a liter. Quantum dots are the foundation of photonic-based quantum devices, such as QLED displays and quantum computing. They’re highly efficient at emitting light, and can be designed to produce single photons at a particular wavelength, which is the basis of communicating between qubits with light.

“I expect quantum to be a growing field for mechanical engineers as it transitions from theory to applications, and the UW and our IMOD partners are global leaders in this area,” says Guymon.
Caroline Long

Greg Guymon holds the printhead filled with colloidal quantum dots up to a blacklight. (Dennis Wise / UW Photo)

Caroline Long
Greg Guymon inserts the printhead into the inkjet printer at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. (Dennis Wise / UW Photo)
Having developed a fine degree of control over this additive manufacturing process — Guymon can print individual quantum dots separated by just 100 nanometers in large arrays, from square microns to millimeters in area — the IMOD team has taken a major step towards scalable manufacturing of quantum hardware.

“Greg has been at the center of our team effort to solve a decades-long challenge: positioning single colloidal quantum dots,” says IMOD director David Ginger, B. Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the UW. “The ability to do this reliably and at scale opens new paths to fabricating quantum light sources, as well as new ways of thinking about colloidal materials and their possible applications.”

After fabricating a device, Greg Guymon uses a microscope to examine its array of hundreds of quantum dots. (Dennis Wise / UW Photo)

The single quantum dot inkjet printing method is a zero waste, additive process that minimizes toxic heavy-metal and solvent use and reduces the number and cost of the fabrication tools needed, MacKenzie says, and could make nanoscale manufacturing cheaper, more sustainable and more accessible. In contrast, “subtractive” manufacturing processes such as etching or masking can waste more than 90% of valuable active materials and produce substantial waste streams in each step. And to fabricate conventional computer chips, silicon wafers are baked at temperatures over 1,000°C, which requires more energy as well as more sophisticated built infrastructure.

But the Testbeds are built inside an unassuming warehouse behind an outdoor mall, just a short ride from central campus on the Seattle city bus. While booties, eye protection, and gloves are required in the main lab space, Guymon is pushing the boundaries of quantum hardware in an open floor plan, working in room temperature and ambient air while rubbing shoulders with innovators from Microsoft, fledgling startups, and UW clean energy labs.

Caroline Long
Greg Guymon is one of over 850 registered users at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. (Dennis Wise / UW Photo)

He frequently collaborates with fellow Huskies on IMOD research projects, including chemists in the Gamelin (RT-1), Cossairt (RT-1), and Ginger (RT-2) groups, as well as physicists and electrical engineers in the Fu and Majumdar groups (RT-3). And sometimes he’ll receive a package from a thousand miles away that contains samples of new quantum dot materials, developed and synthesized at other IMOD member institutions. While Guymon isn’t the first MacKenzie Group student to work on inkjet printing at the nanoscale, support and partnerships through IMOD have supercharged their efforts to advance photonics manufacturing — accelerating our quantum future, layer by layer.

Adapted from an article by Lyra Fontaine, UW Mechanical Engineering.