Optochemical organization is a powerful single-step route that employs low-intensity incandescent light to generate complex, optically functional 3-D polymer architectures. In this technique, we exploit the instability of broad light beams in photopolymerizing media and their spontaneous division into large populations (> 10, 000 cm-3) of self-trapped filaments. Each filament is a microscopic thread of light, which inscribes a polymer channel – a multimode waveguide – along its path. By employing multiple, spatially modulated beams, we can corral filaments into a richly diverse collection of lattices with square, near-cubic, simple cubic, BCC and woodpile geometries.
This seminar highlights two recently developed applications of our approach to optochemical organization. The first is a WaveguIDe Encoded Intersecting (WIDEI) lattice – which like an insect’s compound eye – possesses a significantly enhanced field of view. Because they are fabricated in flexible, robust photopolymer media, WIDEI lattices could serve as intelligent encapsulants of light-harvesting devices or light-shaping conformal coatings on LEDs. More generally, this approach opens pathways to a fundamentally new generation of planar, flexible, thin film optics that can capture, steer, guide, transmit and focus light. The second application exploits the interactions of optochemically organizing filaments to elicit the spontaneous transfer of information between light beams and develop a new technology to encode optical data.
