Nanofiber drawing and nanodevice assembly in poly(trimethylene terephthalate)

We report flexible and elastic enough nanofibers with diameters down to 60 nm and lengths up to 500 mm, fabricated by one-step drawing process from molten poly(trimethylene terephthalate) (PTT), exhibiting high surface smoothness and length uniformity. A series of ultracompact devices (such as optical beam splitters, couplers, rings, resonators, and tweezer/scissor-shaped structures) and nanophotonic device arrays have been assembled by the PTT nanofibers. Quantitative studies demonstrate that the PTT nanofibers/nanofiber devices exhibit good guiding properties with low optical loss from visible to near infrared region. The results suggest that the PTT nanophotonic fibers/wires would be promising candidates in constructing miniaturized photonic devices and ultracompact photonic integrated circuits (PICs), and a one-step drawing as an alternative to the standard optical bench technique. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.