Inorganic–organic hybrid materials for application in optical devices

Materials and technologies for fabrication of three-dimensional microstructures with sub-100 nm feature sizes by two-photon polymerization

“…[19][20][21] Furthermore, they exhibit excellent optical properties and biocompatibility, thus being a perfect material for micro-optical and biomedical applications. [22][23][24][25][26] For synthesis, alcoxysilane-precursors undergo hydrolysis and polycondensation reactions resulting in an organically modified inorganic-oxidic network ([Si-O] n ). This liquid resin can then be crosslinked photochemically and/or thermically resulting in solidified structures.…”

Structural characterisation of a sol-gel copolymer synthesised from aliphatic and aromatic alkoxysilanes using 29Si-NMR spectroscopy

“…The flexibility of the approach, resulting from the large variety of available precursors and low synthesis temperature, offers the potential molecular engineering of both composition and properties for a wide range of solid materials. For optical applications, organic/inorganic hybrid materials have gained increased importance over the last decade, mainly due to their simplicity of preparation in the fabrication of photonic devices for the second and third telecommunication windows, located respectively at 1310 and 1550 nm [5][6][7][8][9]. However, the main factor limiting the development of such devices has been high propagation losses caused by absorption and scattering effects within the material.…”

Two-Photon Polymerization of Inorganic-Organic Hybrid Polymers as Scalable Technology Using Ultra-Short Laser Pulses

“…Due to the fact that the selected ORMOCER ® materials exhibit particularly low absorption losses at data and telecom wavelengths (850, 1310, and 1550 nm) (Houbertz et al, 2003b), the employment of TPA for the fabrication of highly sophisticated optical designs would be advantageous, since this process can also be carried out on pre-configured substrates, already containing opto-electronic elements such as laser-or photodiodes, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL), or microlenses. Two-photon absorption (TPA) processing was used for the fabrication of multimode waveguide (WG) using just one individual ORMOCER ® material which was specially designed for the process.…”

“…The adaptation of polymers to laser beam characteristics and vice versa is very challenging from the scientific as well as from the technological point of view. Besides the implementation of two-photon absorption microscopy (Denk et al, 1990;Denk & Svoboda, 1997) and spectroscopy (Asaka et al, 1998;Yamaguchi & Tahara, 2003), TPA is ® s for microsystems which are applied, for example, as optical interconnects or waveguides (Streppel et al, 2002;Uhlig et al, 2006), in microoptics (Bräuer et al, 2001;Houbertz et al, 2006), in electro-optical applications (Robertsson et al, 1998;Houbertz et al, 2008a), as dielectric layers (Haas et al, 2006), and as passivation materials for the encapsulation of microelectronic devices and components (Houbertz et al, 2001;2003a;2003b). The processing of an ORMOCER ® typically consists of two steps.…”