Submicron Structures in Dye-Doped Polymer Materials

Dye-doped polymer materials are ideal for forming integrated optical devices. The materials can be spun onto a substrate and photobleached to create device structures,and can also be poled to create a noncentrosymmetric maerial with a second order nonlinearity.

The drive to make integrated optical devices such as detectors, modulators, delay lines and wavelength shifters both smaller and more efficient is guiding research efforts towards making materials with larger nonlinearities and lower loss. While leading to innovations in materials research, another route to improving device efficiency and miniaturization remains relatively unexplored: the use of integrated optical slow light structures. While scale reduction is possible with slow light structures, the increased interaction time in the medium leaves questions concerning the efficiency of this approach.

A nonlinear dye-doped polymer optical rectification detector has an optical input for receiving a modulated optical carrier signal, an optical structure for conveying the modulated optical carrier through the detector, and an electrical structure overlaid with the optical structure arranged to optimize matching between electrical and optical waves and to enhance the second order nonlinearity of polymer in the detector. A planar waveguide fabrication method deposits a thin dye-doped polymer film onto a substrate, photobleaches one or more waveguides into the thin dye-doped polymer film, anneals the one or more waveguides to relieve stresses induced during the photobleaching process, and then forms endfaces by cleaving the substrate.

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