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Published online: 3 September 2008 | doi:10.1038/nchina.2008.207

Optics: Splitter with a twist

Vicki Cleave

Introduction

© (2008) ACS

Miniaturizing optical components often involves increasing the level of complexity in their fabrication. This is not the case with Baojun Li and co-workers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou¹, who have produced low-loss miniaturized photonic coupling splitters by using a simple twisting technique.

The researchers drew uniform polymer nanowires from a polymer melt. The good mechanical properties of the wires meant that they could be tightly twisted into a 'butterfly' figure (pictured top).

When the researchers launched laser light into one of the wires (pictured bottom), the light split in the twisted region and emerged along the wire branches on the other side. The ratio of the light intensity in each of the branches could easily be controlled by changing either the wavelength of the light or the branching angles.

Li and co-workers managed to make an 8 8 splitter by twisting eight fibres together, and the twisted region was only 15 m long — much smaller than those made using conventional methods such as photolithography. The ultracompact size of the splitters should make them ideal for tiny devices, and the simplicity of the approach is attractive for fast, cheap manufacturing of other photonic components.

The authors of this work are from:
State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Physics and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.

Reference

1. Xing, X., Zhu, H., Wang, Y. & Li, B. Ultracompact photonic coupling splitters twisted by PTT nanowires. Nano Lett. doi: 10.1021/nl8014507 (2008). | Article |