Thin film polymer photonics: Spin cast distributed Bragg reflectors and chirped polymer structures

Polymer based photonic structures were produced by spin coating up to 50 alternating layers of polystyrene (PS) and poly(vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) from mutually exclusive (orthogonal) solvents. The resulting thin film multi-layer structures were studied using a simple optical reflectivity apparatus and were shown to have narrow (10-20nm wide) reflectance bands in the visible region. The position of the reflectance bands was controlled by varying the spin speed used during production of the multi-layers and peak reflectance values of 55% were obtained for samples containing 50 layers. The results were shown to be in agreement with modified optical transfer matrix method calculations which include the effects of diffuse polymer interfaces. This modelling approach revealed that the width of the polymer/polymer interfaces formed by spin coating was in the range 15-20nm. Data and calculations were also obtained for chirped polymer photonic structures. These results were also shown to be in good agreement. These experiments demonstrate that simple processing methods such as spin coating can be used to produce organic photonic structures with tailored optical properties.