A Tandem Approach to Fabricate a Hybrid, Organic-Add-Drop Filter Using Single-Crystal Disk-Resonators and Pseudo-Plastic Crystal Waveguides

The progress of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and related nanophotonic technologies is greatly influenced by precise and complex circuit fabrication know-how. The integration of chemically different, multiple optical components for constructing hybrid PICs is a tedious and costly affair. Herein, a novel approach to construct a key optical circuit component is reported, namely a hybrid organic add-drop filter (HOADF) by tandem use of two different techniques, namely, mechanophotonics (micromechanical manipulation) and crystal photonics foundry (focused ion beam, FIB-assisted crystal milling). The successful integration of FIB-milled, yellow-emissive, perylene disk resonators (DRs) to two chemically different pseudo-plastic microcrystal waveguides, namely yellow-orange-emitting (Z)-2-(3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)-3-(7-methoxybenzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazol-4-yl)acrylonitrile (BTD2CF3) and green-emitting (E)-1-(((5-bromopyridin-2-yl)imino)methyl)naphthalen-2-ol (BPyIN), provides a three-component HOADF. The fabricated HOADF produce, split, route light signals of different wavelengths in a controlled fashion as anticipated from the circuit geometry. This presented innovative technique has the potential to enable bulk-scale manufacturing of industrial standard organic PICs. The true potential of organic crystals for photonic circuit applications is not understood completely. Here the fabrication of a hybrid organic photonic integrated circuit (OPIC) is demonstrated with the aid of a microcrystal manipulation technique (mechanophotonics) and a crystal milling technique (crystal photonics foundry). The combination of both techniques allows for rapid production of OPICs for photonic technologies.image