Photonic technologies rely on the controlled propagation of ‘photons’, i.e. the quantum of light. These have various advantages compared to devices using electronic charge carriers (electronic devices), the most important are speed and the fact that photons can intersect without interacting. As a consequence, data transmitted by light can travel longer distances, faster, and most often with considerably lower losses and interferences. Applications of photonics would, thus, be ubiquitous, including areas from everyday life to the most advanced science uses, i.e. from telecommunications, information processing, sensing, medicine, and the like. Unfortunately, the development of photonic technologies has hitherto been slow. One of the main reasons resides in the lack of industrially applicable methods to process materials of the required optical characteristics.
So far, inorganic systems are selected for the fabrication of photonic crystals. Whilst they can exhibit high refractive indices - a number that describes how light propagates through that medium, it cannot be varied in a controlled way and is fixed for a given material. Therefore, in most cases many processing steps need to be changed when already one of the constituent of a multicomponent systems is varied, which is not an ideal situation from a technological point of view. Similar problems arise from more standard lithographic methods, which have traditionally been adopted for photonic structures manufacturing. They are difficult to be scaled to industrial level due to their high-cost and small patternable area. Therefore, a “photonic revolution” can be foreesen, if the development of easy-to-process materials and cost-effective, high-throughput processing methods for production of photonic elements is realised. Thereby, this is currently one of the hottest scientific topics from both scientific and social perspectives, as contributing to such development of photonics will generate knowledge, growth, services and more and better jobs that will deliver economic and social welfare.
My project was designed to produce such a step change through the development of versatile, rapid, low cost, processing routes that allow efficient and controlled deposition of optical materials into photonic structures. I proposed to produce a step change in the photonics field through the employment of the Dynamic Templating Process, a solution-processing method, which exploits the self-assembly of water microdroplets to create microscale honeycombs in a polymer-based material of suitable optical properties. Due to these properties and the honeycomb-like morphology induced, these materials would present photonic properties, so that they would allow manipulating the flow of light. Hence, this project was designed to generate new knowledge as well as a new disruptive technology to lay the foundations for a next generation low-cost photonic devices that will contribute to strengthen Europe´s long-standing position in manufacturing.
