UV-nanoimprinting lithography of Bragg Gratings on hybrid sol-gel based channel waveguides

Abstract: We report on the fabrication in a single step of a channel grating loaded waveguide on Titanium based hybrid sol-gel material. This result has been accomplished by the merging of several lithographic techniques, namely conventional, laser interference, and soft lithography. Conventional lithographic processes have been employed for fabricating channel waveguides on a previously holographically written planar photopolymerizable sol-gel film. Such structures have been used as a master to produce a negative replica in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and subsequently exploited to reproduce the master patterns by UV-nanoimprinting on photopolymerizable hybrid sol-gel coatings (titanium and 3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl methacrylate). Optical and morphological characterization of the various fabrication steps and of the final device have been reported and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]