Tunable Diffractive Optical Elements Based on Shape-Memory Polymers Fabricated via Hot Embossing.

We introduce actively tunable diffractive optical elements fabricated from shape-memory polymers (SMPs). By utilizing the shape-memory effect of the polymer, at least one crucial attribute of the diffractive optical element (DOE) is tunable and adjustable subsequent to the completed fabrication process. A thermoplastic, transparent, thermoresponsive polyurethane SMP was structured with diverse diffractive microstructures via hot embossing. The tunability was enabled by programming a second, temporary shape into the diffractive optical element by mechanical deformation, either by stretching or a second embossing cycle at low temperatures. Upon exposure to the stimulus heat, the structures change continuously and controllable in a predefined way. We establish the novel concept of shape-memory diffractive optical elements by illustrating their capabilities, with regard to tunability, by displaying the morphing diffractive pattern of a height tunable and a period tunable structure, respectively. A sample where an arbitrary structure is transformed to a second, disparate one is illustrated as well. To prove the applicability of our tunable shape-memory diffractive optical elements, we verified their long-term stability and demonstrated the precise adjustability with a detailed analysis of the recovery dynamics, in terms of temperature dependence and spatially resolved, time-dependent recovery.

Liquid polystyrene: a room-temperature photocurable soft lithography compatible pour-and-cure-type polystyrene.

Materials matter in microfluidics. Since the introduction of soft lithography as a prototyping technique and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as material of choice the microfluidics community has settled with using this material almost exclusively. However, for many applications PDMS is not an ideal material given its limited solvent resistance and hydrophobicity which makes it especially disadvantageous for certain cell-based assays. For these applications polystyrene (PS) would be a better choice. PS has been used in biology research and analytics for decades and numerous protocols have been developed and optimized for it. However, PS has not found widespread use in microfluidics mainly because, being a thermoplastic material, it is typically structured using industrial polymer replication techniques. This makes PS unsuitable for prototyping. In this paper, we introduce a new structuring method for PS which is compatible with soft lithography prototyping. We develop a liquid PS prepolymer which we term as "Liquid Polystyrene" (liqPS). liqPS is a viscous free-flowing liquid which can be cured by visible light exposure using soft replication templates, e.g., made from PDMS. Using liqPS prototyping microfluidic systems in PS is as easy as prototyping microfluidic systems in PDMS. We demonstrate that cured liqPS is (chemically and physically) identical to commercial PS. Comparative studies on mouse fibroblasts L929 showed that liqPS cannot be distinguished from commercial PS in such experiments. Researchers can develop and optimize microfluidic structures using liqPS and soft lithography. Once the device is to be commercialized it can be manufactured using scalable industrial polymer replication techniques in PS--the material is the same in both cases. Therefore, liqPS effectively closes the gap between "microfluidic prototyping" and "industrial microfluidics" by providing a common material.

All-polymer organic semiconductor laser chips: parallel fabrication and encapsulation.

Organic semiconductor lasers are of particular interest as tunable visible laser light sources. For bringing those to market encapsulation is needed to ensure practicable lifetimes. Additionally, fabrication technologies suitable for mass production must be used. We introduce all-polymer chips comprising encapsulated distributed feedback organic semiconductor lasers. Several chips are fabricated in parallel by thermal nanoimprint of the feedback grating on 4″ wafer scale out of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and cyclic olefin copolymer (COC). The lasers consisting of the organic semiconductor tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum (Alq3) doped with the laser dye 4-dicyanomethylene-2-methyl-6-(p-dimethylaminostyril)-4H-pyrane (DCM) are hermetically sealed by thermally bonding a polymer lid. The organic thin film is placed in a basin within the substrate and is not in direct contact to the lid. Thus, the spectral properties of the lasers are unmodified in comparison to unencapsulated lasers. Grating periods of 378 nm to 428 nm in steps of 10 nm result in lasing at wavelengths of 622 nm to 685 nm. The operational lifetime of the lasers expressed in number of pulses is improved 11-fold (PMMA) and 3-fold (COC) in comparison to unencapsulated PMMA devices.