Optically induced growing of fiber patterns into a photopolymerizable resin

Summary form only given. We have demonstrated that when the actinic light beam irradiates the photopolymerizable resin, a single fiber structure, whose diameter and length are on the order of a few and hundreds of microns, respectively, can be grown automatically. The mechanism of this process is a combination of refractive-index increases by undergoing photopolymerization of the resin upon light irradiation and waveguide light propagation in a micro fiber of a refractive-index slightly higher than the surrounding. We call this fabrication process self-growing. In this talk, we will show that when the laser light power and the numerical aperture (NA) of the objective lens, which is used to focus the beam, are varied, different fiber structures can be grown. The structures that we observed consist of multiple fibers that grow starting from the focal point of the incident beam in a radial manner and with a diameter in the order of few /spl mu/m.