Center Smart Materials and Adaptive Systems CeSMAHybridpolymers are excellent optical materials. Due to the silicon-oxidic part, the materials imitate the optical behavior of glass materials. Starting from these basic properties, the material can be further adjusted, such as refractive index, thermo-optical coefficient, dispersion behavior, etc.. One advantage of hybrid polymers compared to other optical polymers is the excellent optical stability even under extreme stress by simultaneous exposition to UV light and temperature input. Similar to glass, hybrid polymers can be designed to have extremely low absorption at Datacom wavelengths (1310 nm, 1550 nm).
The use of crosslinkable chemical groups enable one to use numerous patterning technologies in order to create complex optical structures. From sub-µm scaled structures created by Two-Photon-Polymerization to illuminating optics manufactured via 3D printing, a lot of technologies can be used.
Adaptive optics is one of the research topics of CeSMA in order to adapt the refractive index or the shape in dependence of external stimuli.