A porous glass waveguide doped with an electro-optic polymer

Many devices using the electro-optic effect, in which the index of refraction changes upon application of an external electrical field, have been proposed to control the propagation of light in planar waveguides. Some electro-optic waveguides are made from polymers materials. However, none of them has the circular symmetry of optical fibers. Therefore the connection between optical fibers and planar waveguides is a difficult and costly task. A solution to this problem is to insert electro-optic polymers in a porous optical fiber. Such porous fibers are made of a plurality of interconnected micro-pores in a skeleton of silica glass and can be obtained from phase separation of alkali-borosilicate optical fibers. In this work, we describe porous optical fibers filled with a DR1-polyacrylate electro-optic polymer.