Preparation of flexible optical waveguide film with refractive index tunability

摘要

Novel organic-inorganic hybrid materials were successfully synthesized by non-hydrolytic sol-gel processing. Crack-freeand thick films were produced with no remaining traces of solvents without high volume shrinkage. Adjusting thechemical composition of the materials allows the precise tailoring of the optical properties of the materials, such asoptical loss, birefringence, refractive index, and thermo-optic coefficient. They can be fabricated into the step indexoptical waveguide structures with well-defined and reproducible refractive index differences within 0.001. Thetransmission performance of each waveguide channel was tested using a 10 Gbps data stream. The electrical outputsignal from a photodetector, connected to a wide-band oscilloscope, displays a clear 10 Gbps eye pattern. We produced aseries of flexible optical waveguides from organic-inorganic hybrid materials by using soft-lithographic technique. Theoptical losses of the flexible waveguide arrays bent over various curvatures were measured and the transmissionperformance of each waveguide channel was also tested. The bending losses of a flexible waveguide array weremeasured and found to yield no significant loss above 2 mm diameter curvature.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.