Multilayer Polymer Photonics: From “Origami” Lasers to Optical Data Storage to Cavity Polaritons – Ken Singer

Date: Thu. March 22nd, 2012, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

The National Science Foundation Center for Layered Polymer Systems (CLiPS), in its sixth year at CWRU, is focused on a novel multilayer co-extrusion technique, which is a highly scalable roll-to-roll process capable of producing many square meters of periodic layered films in minutes. Co-extruded polymer films already have a number of applications, and research is now aimed at exploring optical and electronic phenomena and applications. Depending on the layer dimensions and periodicity, these films could act as gradient refractive index materials, photonic crystals, and other optical multilayer structures. Of particular interest is imparting to one of the layer types such functions as stimulated emission, nonlinear optics, magneto-optics, etc. Multilayer periodic photonic crystal films can be formed into large sheet lasers including distributed Bragg reflector lasers, distributed feedback lasers, and some novel tunable lasers produced by simply folding the laser sheets. I will also show how Anderson localization affects the laser output. In addition, I will present recent results in producing a substrate for terabyte to petabyte optical data storage, and in particular our success at writing in 23 layers using Blu-ray lasers. Finally, I will describe our studies of microcavity polaritons in organic thin films and their dramatic effects on the optical properties of photovoltaic semiconductors.