New glassy Materials and Optical fibers for wellbeing in Society

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The recent technological advances in the development of new glass compositions, unconventional optical fibers design and manufacturing at a micro-/nano- scale are paving the way for major breakthroughs in the field of miniaturized and integrated technologies. Regarding more specifically fiber drawing, researchers have devoted their activity mainly to silica-based fiber glasses for photonics and fiber lasers, while "exotic" materials (chalcogenide, fluoride, tellurite, etc.) are merging from the last 15 years as alternative when the narrow transmission window of silica in the infrared rules out its utilization in particular applications. Nowadays however, fiber drawing technology is slowly morphing into a processing route enabling the use of new type of materials and/or set of materials, new geometries, and new protocols. Semiconductors filled-core silica fibers for mid-IR optics are for instance envisaged, multi-materials glass-metal-polymer fibers for acoustic or photo-detection, or fluid dynamic control for nanoparticles/nanowire fabrication. For their development, new fabrication routes for fibers or preforms should be invented to enable the combination of materials or composite structures requested for achieving the targeted functionalities in the future photonic components and systems. Complex association of materials with specific properties in the form of fibers that can be easily integrated or interconnected and provide novel solutions to specific problems where the collection and integration of data of different nature is required. Recently, multi-material and multifunctional fibers have demonstrated their strong potential to offer concurrently multiple functionalities like electrical conductivity, piezoelectricity, physical / chemical sensing in addition to light transmission. Then, complex structures can be designed and explored by taking directly inspiration from nature, bioinspired photonics and structural materials. Our approach in this Discovery Grant proposal is relying on the association of recent advances accomplished in two technological domains: (i) the exploration of new glass compositions than can be combined with other materials (e.g. polymers, metals) to produce multi-material and multifunctional fibers and; (ii) the implementation of innovative and appropriate processes to achieve the desired properties depending on the applications area. In this proposal, we will be focusing on materials for communication, health, energy, and environment.