By exploiting the capability of direct laser writing on different photopolymerizable materials on the same chip and the versatile properties of different polymers, Sara Nocentini and colleagues from Italy have demonstrated a three-dimensional active and tunable polymeric integrated network for telecommunications at 1,550 nm. They designed, fabricated and characterized straight and bent waveguides, grating couplers, and single and vertically coupled whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonators. Passive, rigid photonic components were first fabricated on a low-refractive-index fused silica substrate. To realize tunable photonic resonators, the team integrated liquid-crystalline networks (LCNs) into the photonic circuit. The shape change and the refractive-index variation due to the optically induced rearrangement of LCN polymeric chains were exploited in two different ways to tune the photonic resonators — LCNs were used as an actuator to finely change the shape of the WGM resonators and were also used to make the resonator itself.
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Won, R. Tunable circuits. Nature Photon 12, 500 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-018-0250-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-018-0250-0