Multi-Photon Fabrication of Compact Optical Waveguides
The EPFL Photonics Chapter (EPC) welcomes you to the new academic year and inaugurates the activities of this semester with the good, old POB seminar series!
We are very pleased to announce and cordially invite you to our first ‘Pizza-Optics-Beer’ (POB) seminar of the semester, on Wednesday 26th of September at 18:15 in room CE1 101.
This month we will have the pleasure to host Giulia Panusa from the Laboratory of Optics (LO) with the presentation entitled:
“Multi-Photon Fabrication of Compact Optical Waveguides in Polydimethylsiloxane "
For organizational purposes (if you want to eat pizza!), please confirm your participation using this Doodle.
Don’t hesitate to extend the invitation to any postdoc and colleague!
Hope to see you there,
The team of the EPFL Photonics Chapter
Abstract:
Compact, low loss optical waveguides are needed in optofluidic and microfluidic devices for a dense integration of optical functionalities. We demonstrate the fabrication of compact optical waveguides in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) through multiphoton laser writing (MLW) using phenylacetylene as the photosensitive monomer. Our fabrication technique employs photo-induced radical chain polymerization initiated by the monomer molecule itself without a photoinitiator. Because of the dense π-electrons in phenylacetylene, we achieved a high refractive index contrast (Δn ≥ 0.06) between the waveguide core and the PDMS cladding. This allowed for efficient waveguiding with a core size of 1.3-µm with a measured loss of 0.03 dB/cm in the spectral band of 650-700 nm.