In this paper, a thiol-ene based polymer waveguide, defined by UV-assisted soft lithography, is designed, fabricated and characterized. Waveguides are formed by filling microfluidic channels with a high refractive index liquid mixture of 'thiol' and 'ene' monomers (e.g., trimethylolpropane tris(3-mercaptopropionate) = 'thiol', and 1,3,5-triallyl-1,3,5-triazine-2,4, 6(1H, 3H, 5H)-trione = 'ene'),
... [Show full abstract] which can be cured by UV exposure into a solid polymer. The waveguides demonstrated good confinement of light, and a propagation loss of 0.5 dB/cm was obtained. To our best knowledge, this is the first report to employ thiol-ene based polymers as waveguide core materials for potential optofluidic applications.
