Polymer rare earth nanoparticle waveguide amplifier

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Photonics technologies and nanotechnologies are widely recognized in Canada as significant domains of competitive activity because of their potential to generate new science, new technologies and new markets with significant economic impact in health, engineering, the environment, manufacturing and communications. Photonics loosely refers to the use of light to transmit, alter, store or retrieve information. Nanotechnologies are concerned with exploiting the fundamental new properties that emerge when objects are made very small. This project combines opportunities in both strategic domains. It describes methods to make tiny particles (nanoparticles) that contain rare earth ions like erbium that can be used to amplify optical signals. The project also describes very simple ways of locating these nanoparticles in polymer (plastic) materials that can be fabricated into optical circuits that will conduct light. One function of the optical circuit is to amplify light at the telecommunications wavelength around 1550 nm. Optical amplifiers are in great demand in the photonics industry. These optical circuits are normally difficult to make, but we propose simplified ways to do this by incorporating nanoparticles into polymer films into which optical circuits can be projected by elementary optical printing techniques, called photolithography. The resulting device is called a Polymer Rare Earth Doped Waveguide Amplifier (PREDWA). More generally, a breakthrough in the research might lead to new kinds of devices that actually require less or no amplification by virtue of including rare earth doped nanoparticles in the compositions.