electrospray-deposition-uniform-thickness-ge23sb7s70-as40s60

Electrospray Deposition of Uniform Thickness Ge23Sb7S70 and As40S60 Chalcogenide Glass Films

Solution-based electrospray film deposition, which is compatible with continuous, roll-to-roll processing, is applied to chalcogenide glasses. Two ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Integrated photonics provides a miniaturized and potentially implantable platform to manipulate and enhance the interactions between light and biological molecules or tissues in in-vitro and in-vivo settings, and is thus being increasingly adopted in a wide cross-section of biomedical applications ranging from disease diagnosis to optogenetic neuromodulation. However, the mechanical rigidity of substrates traditionally used for photonic integration is fundamentally incompatible with soft biological tissues. Cytotoxicity of materials and chemicals used in photonic device processing imposes another constraint towards these biophotonic applications. Here we present thin film TiO2 as a viable material for biocompatible and flexible integrated photonics. Amorphous TiO2 films were deposited using a low temperature (<250 °C) sol-gel process fully compatible with monolithic integration on plastic substrates. High-index-contrast flexible optical waveguides and resonators were fabricated using the sol-gel TiO2 material, and resonator quality factors up to 20,000 were measured. Following a multi-neutral-axis mechanical design, these devices exhibit remarkable mechanical flexibility, and can sustain repeated folding without compromising their optical performance. Finally, we validated the low cytotoxicity of the sol-gel TiO2 devices through in-vitro cell culture tests. These results demonstrate the potential of sol-gel TiO2 as a promising material platform for novel biophotonic devices.

Foldable and Cytocompatible Sol-gel TiO2 Photonics.

Low-loss waveguides constitute an important building block for integrated photonic systems. In this work, we investigated low-loss photonic device fabrication in Ge23Sb7S70 chalcogenide glass using electron beam lithography followed by plasma dry etching. High-index-contrast waveguides with a low propagation loss of 0.5 dB/cm and microdisk resonators with an intrinsic quality factor (Q-factor) of 1.2×106 were demonstrated. Both figures represent, to the best of our knowledge, the best low-loss results reported thus far in submicrometer single-mode chalcogenide glass devices.

Article	Year
Foldable and Cytocompatible Sol-gel TiO2 Photonics. Scientific reports\| PubMed ID: 26344823	2015
Low-loss photonic device in Ge-Sb-S chalcogenide glass. Optics letters\| PubMed ID: 27367109	2016

Qingyang Du

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