Single-mode, air-cladded optical waveguides have wavelength scale diameters, making them very fragile and difficult to handle and yet highly desirable for sensing and inter-chip photonic interconnects. These contradictory qualities are resolved in this work by supporting the optical waveguide with a nano-fin structure attached to a substrate, narrow enough and sufficiently tall to minimally impact the wave-guiding metrics of the solid core while providing structural mechanical integrity. The design considerations for the nano-fin-supported waveguide and its realization using a commercial direct laser writing system based on two-photon activation of a photopolymer is reported herein. The 3D printed waveguides are characterized and experimentally assessed, demonstrating low birefringence and an estimated propagation loss for LP01x and LP01y of 2.9 dB/mm and 3.4 dB/mm, respectively, attributed to surface roughness and the relatively high refractive index contrast with air.

Single-mode polymer optical waveguides with air cladding, supported only by a narrow fin, were designed and fabricated by direct laser writing technique. The waveguides offer low bending losses and high confinement with increasing core diameter.

We 3D-print a nanofin-supported waveguide bridging two cores at the fiber tip and further coupled to a printed ring resonator. The resonance wavelength shift is probed from the fiber’s distal end, shifting by 47 pm/°K.

We proposed gas sensor based on a simple configuration of a quad-band metamaterial absorber (MMA), the unit cell of the proposed sensor is designed with three metallic rods placed inside a square metallic ring, on the top of a grounded dielectric substrate. The proposed sensor has a sensitivity 170GHz/RIU.