Perfluoropolymer optical waveguides with low propagation loss and high reliability

We fabricated single mode optical waveguides made of perfluoropolymers with extremely low propagation loss at communication wavelengths reaching even 1650 nm, and found they showed high reliability. The used materials are poly(perfluorinated butenyl vinyl ether) and the chemically-related materials. In the previously reported trial, we used the doped core in order to adjust the refractive index. The propagation loss was low enough for us to use at 1310 and 1550 nm, but the existence of dopant limited the loss reduction. In this paper we report on the perfluoropolymer optical waveguides with dopant-free core. The propagation loss was 0.03-0.04 dB/cm at both 1550 and 1650 nm. The spectral measurement showed that their propagation losses are lower than 0.1 dB/cm all over the communication wavelengths. High durability to humidity was also shown. As an application of this optical waveguide, we demonstrated the 1x32 splitter.