May 09, 2014 |
Graphene photonics breakthrough promises fast-speed, low-cost communications
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(Nanowerk News) Swinburne researchers have developed a high-quality continuous graphene oxide thin film that shows potential for ultrafast telecommunications ("In Situ Third-Order Non-linear Responses During Laser Reduction of Graphene Oxide Thin Films Towards On-Chip Non-linear Photonic Devices").
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Associate Professor Baohua Jia led a team of researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics to create a micrometre thin film with record-breaking optical nonlinearity suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices used in all-optical communications, biomedicine and photonic computing.
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“Such a laser patternable highly nonlinear thin film, about one hundredth of a human hair, has not been achieved by any other material,” Professor Jia said.
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Graphene is derived from carbon, the fourth most abundant element on earth. It has many useful properties, including light transparency and electrical conductivity, and can be completely recycled.
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To create the thin film the researchers spin coated graphene oxide solution to a glass surface.
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Using a laser as a pen they created microstructures on the graphene oxide film to tune the nonlinearity of the material.
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“We have developed a new platform in which we can fabricate each optical component with desired nonlinearity,” PhD student Xiaorui Zheng said.
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“Currently with telecommunications or all optical communications you have to fabricate each component individually and try to integrate them together.
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“Now we can provide a film, on which everything can be fabricated with laser and then it is automatically integratable.”
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Current manufacturing methods in semiconductor labs require expensive cleanrooms to fabricate photonic chips. The fabrication and laser writing of this photonic material is simple and low cost.
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“Using this new method, we have demonstrated the possibility of manufacturing a scalable and cheap material,” Professor Jia said.
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