Study On Polymer Optical Waveguide

Integrated optics is a kind of science including optics, microwave theory, laser technique and optoelectronics. Its emergence and development have a close relationship with the development of the optical communications. In 1969,S.E.Miller proposed the concept of "integrated optics" so that Bell lab became one of the earliest trailblazers of this field. Recently, the great development of the optical communications promotes the integrated optics greatly. The integrated optical circuit surely will be used in the optical fiber communications in the future to take advantage of the wide transmit frequency band of the fiber. But nowadays, the development of integrated optical circuit is highly behind of the development of fiber and still stays in the period of laboratory research because of the complex technics. In the integrated optical circuit, the key unit is the optical waveguide.Polymer material is very promising in fabricating integration optical waveguide devices. The study of polymer waveguide devices is a potential project in the field of optical communication and interconnection. Optical polymer waveguide becomes a hotspot and particularly attractive in integrated optical waveguide devices because they have the advantages on easy integration, rapid processibility and low cost. This dissertation is concentrated on the passive polymer waveguide devices, including material characteristic, fabrication and application.In the linear optics theory, when the incident angle is large enough, the light is totally reflected at both interfaces. Once the light enter the waveguide area, it will be closed in the waveguide and transmit in the Z direction. According to the wave theory, the guided mode forms a stationary wave in the waveguide layer, and forms a evanescent field in the cladding and the substrate of which the swing attenuates exponentially in the X direction. But not all the lights satisfying the equationθc<θs<θcan be transmitted in the.waveguide and form the guided mode. In fact,θwhich can form the guided mode only has several discrete values, so the guided mode is a discrete spectrum. Above is the basic theory our experiment based on.The fabrication of the polymer waveguide is studied experimentally. The theory of ultraviolet(UV) radiation and the experimental setup are analyzed. The physical properties of a ridge waveguide sample, such as absorbance spectra, refractive index, and thickness, are measured and analyzed. Some applications of the polymer waveguides are investigated,furthermore, a newtype of integrated waveguide gyroscope is reported in the paper. Finally, the experimental setup of optical power measurement for polymeric waveguide film is designed. The measurement setup offers convenience for future development of polymer waveguides.