Fabrication of polymer optical waveguides using proton beam writing

町田 裕貴*; 上原 政人*; 三浦 健太*; 花泉 修*; 石井 保行; 佐藤 隆博; 高野 勝昌; 大久保 猛; 山崎 明義; 井上 愛知; et al.

no journal, , 

Development of a polymer optical switch using planer polymer waveguides has been recently of importance in the field of optical fiber communication in order to reduce the size of an optical switch and optical loss in a waveguide. The straight planer polymer waveguides with core sizes from 2 to 16 m in the interval of 2 m were fabricated by irradiating the PMMA films using Proton Beam Writing (PBW) with 1.7 MeV proton beam of about 1 m in diameter as a preliminary study. The observation of the near-field patterns using a vidicon camera showed that the straight waveguides with core sizes of 10 m or less worked as a single-mode waveguides of 1550 nm. We report the fabrication method of the planer polymer waveguides of irradiating straight lines using PBW in PMMA films spin-coated on a Si substrate covered with SiO in the conference. The results of the fabrication of the straight polymer waveguides and the observation of near-field patterns are also explained in the symposium. In the next studies, a thermo-optic polymer switch based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer waveguide will be fabricated after the measurements of the refractive indices of proton-irradiated PMMA films and SiO layers.