Integration of solution processed materials in polymer waveguides

Abstract

Active solution processed nanomaterials have emerged as a very high promising candidates for photonic applications. The reason of this arises from the facts that they exhibit high quantum yield emission at room temperature and wavelength tunability, other than their processing involves easy and cheap fabrication techniques and a versatile integration on different substrates. In this way, active properties of different solution processed materials, as colloidal quantum dots, organic dyes and rare earth nanoparticles, have been exploited to demonstrate spontaneous emission or optical modulation in photonic devices. However, in spite of such an attractiveness of these nanomaterials, little has been done for the development of its practical applications in (organic/hybrid) photonics and the field is at its very beginning. In this work the incorporation of solution processed nanomaterials in dielectric and plasmonic waveguides is compared and analyzed with the intention to study their active properties into a photonic structure. First, dielectric polymer waveguides are designed in order to incorporate the active material and to optimize the generation of photoluminescence/fluorescence. Second, the active-polymer material is combined with plasmonic waveguides by depositing the hybrid material onto a gold film. This kind of waveguides has a great interest for photonic technology because the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) propagating along them exhibits subwavelength confinement, and hence it is an interesting candidate to reduce the size of photonic circuits. However, propagation of SPP is also limited by the strong losses associated to the metal and it becomes necessary their compensation. In this way, we finally study the conditions to couple emitted light into plasmonic modes and eventually to enhance their propagation length.