Repair and Splicing of Centimeter‐Size Organic Crystalline Optical Waveguides

Abstract

AbstractOrganic single crystals that are capable of transmitting light and charge are quickly shaping into a new forefront of research in photoelectronic materials that is thought to hold a tremendous potential for the broader field of organic electronics. However, one of the main disadvantages that currently stands against the direct application of organic single crystals in that capacity is their pronounced proneness to mechanical damage due to brittleness, abrasion, and wear. To account for this drawback, here a simple and universal strategy is proposed for the recovery of macroscopic integrity of cracked or completely fractured crystals based on the layer‐by‐layer charged polymer assembly approach that can be used to effectively recover the damaged crystals. It is shown that in addition to being an effective means for reasonable restoration of their optical waveguiding ability, this approach can also be used to combine different crystals into hybrid organic photonic integrated circuits (OPICs) and even to construct dynamic hybrid OPICs as active and/or passive optical waveguides. The resulting integrated crystalline OPIC bundles act as optical waveguides for transmission of light with different colors and can also be used for light mixing to generate white light.