Ricerc@Sapienza

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), characterized by high optical transparency and low surface energy, electric constant, and Young’s modulus, is widely recognized as an interesting, high-quality organic material for micro- and opto-fluidic functional systems. Other advantage of applying PDMS is its cheap and easy processing owning to the fact that PDMS-based photonic devices are typically fabricated with use of reliable technology based on a standard soft photolithography.

We present optoelectronic tunable and switchable devices for integrated optics based on easy-to-build optical waveguides. The devices take advantage of the spontaneous homeotropically alignment of liquid crystals (LC) molecules to the surface of a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic channel (LC:PDMS). This behaviour was investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations, which allowed to evaluate the molecular organization and ordering inside the cell.