Polymer based tuneable photonic crystals

We report on the fabrication and characterization of photonic crystal slab waveguide resonators which contain a nanostructured second-order nonlinear optical polymer. The combination of a photonic crystal resonator realized in a second-order nonlinear optical polymer allowed the detection of electro-optical modulation of light with a sub-1-V sensitivity. Furthermore we report on the synthesis of novel nonlinear optical polymers with large second-order hyperpolarizability and improved glass transition temperature. The polymer slab waveguide is micro patterned by means of electron-beam lithography and reactive ion etching. The photonic crystal slab-based resonator consisted of a square lattice of holes carrying a linear defect. Applying an external electric modulation voltage to electrodes leads to a linear electro-optical shift of the resonance spectrum and thus to a modulation of the transmission at a fixed wavelength based on the electronic displacement polarization in a noncentrosymmetric medium (Pockels effect). © 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.