All-Polymer Integrated Optical Resonators by Roll-to-Roll Nanoimprint Lithography

Polymers are a highly versatile class of materials for micro and nanofabrication. They have been studied for applications in photonics as they can be readily processed, integrated, and doped with a wide range of materials, and can be flexible and stretchable, providing numerous opportunities such as wearable devices and structures with tunable photonic response. Roll-to-roll nanoimprint lithography (R2RNIL) is a method to produce all-polymer devices, which provides the opportunity to target applications where low cost and high throughput are needed most. Here, finite difference time domain simulations are performed to determine the requirements for R2RNIL in order to produce functional photonic integrated circuits. A wide range of nanophotonic devices are fabricated, including waveguides, photonic crystals, diffraction gratings, and ring resonators. Loaded quality factors as high as 57500 are measured in ring resonators at the telecom wavelength range, enabling on-chip high resolution sensors and spectrometers.