The Optical Properties Of Organic / Inorganic Composite Materials And Its Regulation Of Optical Waveguide Devices

Achieving multifunctional and dense-integrated lightwave circuits is one important goal in photonics. Optical materials are the basis of integrated optics, and the properties and integration ability of devices depend sensitively on the characteristics of materials. On the other hand, for a given material system, proper device structure can help to promote device properties. Therefore, new materials and new device structures are both important in integrated optics. This Ph.D thesis focuses on research works in the subject of "The optical properties of organic/inorganic hybrid materials and reconfigurable waveguide devices". By exploring novel organic/inorganic hybrid materials which combine the merits of organic materials of easy fabrication processes and outstanding optical properties, with inorganic materials that have excellent stability, we developed some new optical waveguide structures with pronounced and new optical functions. Research works include:preparation and characterization of organic/inorganic hybrid materials, design of multifunctional multimode interference (MMI) waveguide devices, design and fabrication of reconfigurable waveguide devices. The main achievements are as follows:1. A new type of reconfigurable multi-channel optical power splitter is proposed to prove that multimode interference (MMI) waveguide enables multifunctional applications and is an excellent platform to fabricate multifunctional optical devices. A 3-channel reconfigurable MMI optical power splitter with four functions is designed. The device can work in C-band with an extinction ratio better than-29.0 dB, excess loss better than -0.45 dB, imbalance better than 0.08 dB and polarization dependent loss (PDL) better than 0.14 dB. A reconfigurable 1×1～1×37 optical power splitter is also proposed by cascading multi-stage 3-channel optical power splitters, and a 1×1～1×5 optical power splitter can be achieved by single MMI waveguide device.2. A new compact asymmetric 1x2 MMI optical switch is designed and fabricated. One of the output channels is moved to the edge of the MMI region to reduce the device size while maintaining its property of high extinction ratio. The MMI waveguide length of the fabricated MMI with organic/inorganic hybrid material is only 2 mm, and the device has a response time of 4.5 ms, a switching power of 52 mW, and an extinction ratio of 20 dB at 1550 nm. Besides, an 8-channel integrated variable optical waveguide attenuators array and a tunable long period waveguide grating filter were designed and fabricated. These works extend the waveguide device types with organic/inorganic hybrid materials.3. A new organic/inorganic hybrid material system, methacryloxypropyl trimethoxysilane/zirconium n-propoxide/diphenylsilanediol (MAPTMS/ZPO/DPSD), is synthesized. The new material combines the merits of MAPTMS/ZPO and MAPTMS/DPSD systems that have been investigated extensively in literature and by us. The material can be contact UV patterned, and its -OH content is less than half of the MAPTMS/ZPO system. Therefore it is suitable to fabricate low-loss waveguide devices for application in optical communication systems.