Routes to polymer-based photonics

The advances in polymer materials and technologies for telecom applications are reported. The polymers include new highly halogenated acrylates, which possess absorption losses less than 0.25 dB/cm and refractive indices ranging from 1.3 to 1.5 in the 1.5 μm wavelength region. The halogenated liquid monomers are highly intermixable, photocurable under UV exposure and exhibit high contrast in polymerization. The polymer technologies developed at the Institute on Laser and Information Technologies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ILIT RAS) include:

–	UV contact lithography permitting creation of single-mode polymer waveguides and waveguide arrays
–	submicron printing for fabricating corrugated waveguides and polymer phase masks
–	UV laser holography for writing refractive index gratings in polymer materials.

The technology for fabricating narrowband Bragg filters on the basis of single-mode polymer waveguides with laser-induced submicron index gratings is presented in detail. The filters possess narrowband reflection/transmission spectra in the 1.5 μm telecom wavelength region of 0.2–2.7 nm width, nearly rectangular shape of the stopband, reflectivity R > 99% and negligible radiation losses. They can be used for multiplexing/demultiplexing optical signals in high-speed DWDM fiber networks. The text was submitted by the authors in English.