UV-nanoimprinting lithography of Bragg Gratings on hybrid sol-gel based channel waveguides

We report on the fabrication in a single step of a channel grating loaded waveguide on Titanium based hybrid sol-gel material.This result has been accomplished by the merging of several lithographic techniques, namely conventional, laser interference, and soft lithography.Conventional lithographic processes have been employed for fabricating channel waveguides on a previously holographically written planar photopolymerizable sol-gel film. Such structures have been used as a master to produce a negative replica in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and subsequently exploited to reproduce the master patterns by UV-nanoimprinting on photopolymerizable hybrid sol-gel coatings (titanium and 3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl methacrylate).Optical and morphological characterization of the various fabrication steps and of the final device have been reported and discussed.