Optical polymer nanofibers as bulilding blocks for miniaturized photonic circuits

Optical polymer nanofibers have highly configurable ability and good guiding properties, which are desirable for building blocks into ultracompact functional photonic devices. In this paper, a flexible and elastic enough polymer nanofiber — poly(trimethylene terephthalate) (PTT) nanofiber with low loss, fabricated by one-step drawing process, was used to building blocks into a series of ultracompact structures and microphotonic devices, such as crossed networks, nanobird´s structure, coupling splitter, ring resonator, Mach-Zehnder interferometers, etc. The results show that these structures and devices are ultracompact with low loss from visible lights to near-infrared region. Therefore, the PTT nanofibers would be promising in constructing miniaturized photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which could provide significant potentials in the fields of optical communications, optical sensing, and optical manipulation.