Fabrication of polymer optical waveguides for the 1.5-m band using focused proton beam

三浦 健太*; 町田 裕貴*; 上原 政人*; 桐生 弘武*; 小澤 優介*; 佐々木 友之*; 花泉 修*; 佐藤 隆博; 石井 保行; 江夏 昌志; et al.

Key Engineering Materials, 497, p.147 - 150, 2011/12

https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/KEM.497.147

Single mode straight waveguides for a wavelength of 1.55-m were, so far, fabricated using a proton beam writing (PBW) technique. We report the fabrication of Y-junction polymer waveguides with a polymethyl methacralate (PMMA) layers as the expansion of these straight waveguides using PBW in the conference. The PMMA layers consisted of an under-cladding layer of SiO having a thickness of 15-m deposited on an Si substrate, a PMMA layer having a thickness of 10-m spin-coated onto the SiO layer and a Y-junction waveguide with a width of 8-m in a PMMA core layer. The Y-junction waveguides with the angle of 2 were drawn using the 1.7 MeV proton beam with 1-m in diameter and a beam current of 10 pA for a dose of 100 nC/mm. After spin-coating the PMMA layer with 10-m thickness as an upper cladding on the irradiated PMMA layer, the near field pattern (NFP) of an 8-m-width Y-junction waveguide was observed using a tunable-wavelength laser. The observation showed that the fabrication of waveguide was succeeded because its waveguide was single mode and the intensity ratio between the two outputted lights was the almost same; 1:0.96. We also briefly report the next plans of the measurement of the refractive indices of proton-irradiated PMMA and SiO films and the fabrication of a thermo-optic polymer switch based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer waveguide.