The fabrication and characterization of polymer optical conductors

Polymer microstructures were evaluated as thin film optical conductors. The polymer waveguides were fabricated from a photosensitive silicone polymer by selectively crosslinking the polymer with the near‐ultraviolet radiation from an argon ion laser. The optical transmittance properties of curved and linear microstructures were characterized using an optical sensing technique. For the curved guides, an exponential decay in the intensity of transmitted light with guide length was observed. The linear guides exhibited an oscillatory relationship between output intensity and length over a range of 2 mm in length. The nature of the results for the linear guides was explained by considering the variations in the refractive index across the polymer microstructure and by comparison with the optical behavior of graded‐index glass fibers.