Polymers of photoreactive calixarene derivatives for optical applications

Abstract

Calixarenes are materials that possess many significant features, such as making inclusion complexes and high thermal stability, because of their cavity-shaped cyclic structure. We synthesized three types of calixarene polymers using calixarene derivatives containing photo reactive groups. Calixarene polymers were synthesized by exposing UV light to the calixarene derivatives. The characteristics of calixarene polymers wre investigated for optical applications. Polymer thin films were easily fabricated by spin coating on the substrates. All the polymers possessed high Td. When calixarene derivatives containing acryloyl groups were polymerized with a monomer containing three methacryloyl groups, the refractive index of the polymer film was saturated within a short period of UV exposure time, and the thickness change was very small, less than 0.6%. The propagation loss of the polymer slab waveguide at 1300nm was 0.5dB/cm, which is less or almost the same as that of PMMA at this wavelength. Single-mode and multi-mode sized optical channel waveguides of calixarene polymer were fabricated using the photolithography and oxygen reactive ion etching. The propagation loss of the multi-mode waveguide was calculated to be less than 1.2 dB/cm at 1300nm.