Study of dye local photo-bleaching obtained by UV lithography for photonics applications

We propose a method to fabricate wavelength selective optical component based on dye local photo-bleaching. Usually, working wavelength ranges of optical grating is limited by refractive index contrasts which exist over a wide wavelength domain. In this work, we have used local photo-bleaching to modulate the refractive index of dye layer only over a limited wavelength range and spatial region. While photo-bleaching is usually considered as a limitation for organic emitter [1] , [2] , it is now exploited in TDBC dye J-aggregate layers for strong coupling application [3] , [4] . With local photo-bleaching, we also exploited this property to locally suppress dye emission and absorption but at the microscale. Using such method, different micrometric designs were elaborated with abrupt interface and no changes in layer thickness. For periodic patterning, selective diffraction is demonstrated at around 590nm wavelength with spectral selectivity of 11nm [5] . This study shows the high potential of local photo-bleaching to develop new optical devices with micrometric resolution.