Superhydrophobic materials have surfaces that are extremely
difficult to wet with water and therefore are of considerable
interest for various industrial applications. Researchers have
unlocked the mechanism that makes some leaves either
superhydrophobic or hydrophilic, opening the way to creating
self cleaning surfaces and interfaces that will not stick.
Potential industrial applications are self cleaning windows and
windshields, hard disks and magnetic tapes (for data storage)
and MEMS and NEMS devices with no stiction issues. New research
shows that soft, conformable sub-wavelength phase masks can be
used, with 2-photon effects, to pattern in a parallel fashion
and in a single exposure step large, 3D structures in certain
classes of photopolymers. The result is a technique that is
simple from an experimental standpoint, but which fully exploits
the flexibility and patterning capabilities enabled by 2-photon
effects, making it useful for applications in photonics,
microfluidics and biotechnology. Among the