WIN Seminar - Dr. Kalaichelvi (Kalai) Saravanamuttu: "Optochemical waves: from bio-inspired optics, 3-D printing to materials for all-optical encoding"

The Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN) presents a seminar by Dr. Kalaichelvi (Kalai) Saravanamuttu, from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada

Optochemical waves: from bio-inspired optics, 3-D printing to materials for all-optical encoding

Abstract

Optochemical waves are nonlinear waves of light, which are characterized by their ability to travel without diverging through a medium. When elicited with laser or weak, incoherent (incandescent, LED) light in photoresponsive systems that undergo permanent chemical changes, they inscribe cylindrical channels, populate these waveguides as optical modes and exhibit several properties reminiscent of spatial solitons. This seminar highlights how optochemical waves have opened unconventional routes to three different applications. The first are Waveguide Encoded Lattices (WELs) - which like an insect’s compound eye - possess a significantly enhanced field of view. Fabricated by launching thousands of optochemical waves in a flexible, robust photopolymer medium, WEL lattices can serve as encapsulants of light-harvesting devices or light-shaping conformal coatings on LEDs. The second application exploits the non-divergent nature of optochemical waves and shows that by embedding patterns within these waves, it is possible to print seamless 3-D objects both in dielectric and metallodielectric materials. This is challenging to achieve with current 3-D printers. Finally, we show how the soliton-like interactions of optochemical waves within a photopolymer cube enable spontaneous transfer of binary information between light beams and create strategies for all-optical encoding.