Nanotechnology for Smart Polymer Optical Devices

Within the last decade the use of nano-structured polymers for biochips, biosensors and novel nano-optical devices gained world-wide attention due to a number of key-developments. The most fascinating example is microelectronics, where smaller means more cost efficiency, more circuits per chip, faster, and less heat to dissipate. Many intriguing new phenomena occur at nanometer dimensions including quantum size effects, Coulomb blockade, plasmon wave guides and electron tunnelling. Defined multilayer nano-assemblies enable to construct three-dimensional devices based on Plasmon and nano-optic resonance. Decisive for these types of devices and sensors is the ultra-precise nanometric assembly. Manufacturing of opto-nano-devices thus requires the development of a completely new set of ultra-precise techniques to deposit, arrange, and couple nano-polymer layers. These nano-layers are the most essential key elements of novel nano-optical-devices. Smart-responsive nano-polymer gels as transducer and building blocks for nano-devices open novel routes to photonic nano-optical sensors and chips. Optical effects based on ‘resonance enhanced absorption (REA)’ in combination with nano-layers of smart-stimulus-response polymers allow the construction of a new type of sensor device. The article will focus on up-to-date lithographic techniques of nanolayers, continue to smart-nanolayer polymers, describe the REA effect and lead to a functional REA-polymer-sensor.