Executive Summary : | UNESCO has declared May 16th as the International Day of Light to highlight the continuous improvement in optical devices, which have enabled fundamental breakthroughs in our daily lives. Nanostructured photonic integrated circuits (PIC) and computational devices can be realized over large-area, flexible, or stretchable configurations, but current processes are difficult to scale to large and non-rigid substrates without transfer techniques. It remains intrinsically difficult to reconcile the requirements of stretch-ability with the mechanical rigidity of high quality, high refractive index photonic materials. A simple approach to self-organize materials into nanostructures is to rely on solid-state dewetting of thin films upon annealing. Template dewetting, which can be controlled by depositing thin layers onto topographically structured surfaces, has not been used to fabricate photonic integrated circuits for performing simple optical computation. The Core research project proposes exploiting template dewetting of high index optical glass thin films on stretchable substrates to realize high performance photonic computational chips over unconventional, non-rigid substrates. The optical glasses to investigate are Chalcogenide glasses, formed by adding elements like Ge, As, Sb, or Ga to chalcogens. These glasses are photonic materials of choice due to their large index of refraction, high optical nonlinear properties, transparency in the infrared, or very high absorption in the visible, depending on their composition that can be engineered by doping. The objectives of the project are to understand the fundamental dewetting process on an elastomeric substrate, design photonic integrated circuits using this dewetting process, and propose dynamically (mechanically) tuneable photonic computational chips. |