Characteristics of polymer waveguide notch filters using thermooptic long-period gratings

We demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of a polymer waveguide notch filter using a thermooptic long-period grating. This notch filter consists of a channel waveguide, a cladding surrounding the channel, and buffer layers sandwiching the cladding. Periodic heaters formed on the upper buffer layer induce a long-period grating thermooptically. Thus, they generate temporarily a resonance band of notch type in the transmission spectrum of the filter. Using thermocurable polymers, we have fabricated notch filters 1 and 2 that have different cladding thicknesses. Experimental results demonstrate two features of the notch filters. One feature is dynamical controllability of the attenuation of a resonance band. For TE mode, the maximum attenuation of notch filters 1 and 2 increases from 0 to 27 dB as the power applied to notch filters 1 and 2 increases from 0 to 851 and 1170 mW, respectively. The other feature is controllability of the direction and magnitude of the center wavelength shift occurring when the attenuation is tuned. The shift property depends on the cladding thickness. The measured characteristics of notch filters 1 and 2 are qualitatively in good agreement with our theoretical analysis. Using this feature, we may implement the notch filter whose attenuation is adjustable without center wavelength shift. This polymer waveguide notch filter may be used to implement a compact filter whose spectrum is dynamically tailored.