LMI Seminar: Embedding Photonically Functional Systems in 3D-Micropatterned Monofilament Fibers

Abstract:

Fiber looming, weaving, and knitting into a textile to create garments that warm and protect us from scratches have been known to humans for thousands of years. With augmented reality and artificial intelligence becoming part of the fabric of day-to-day life, fibers and textiles are increasingly seen as real estate for the integration of active capabilities, such as sensing, stimulation, and data processing, in addition to traditional passive ones. The ever-increasing need for training data sets and their processing has recently driven the explosive development of a plethora of novel hardware. From spintronic and photonic to neuromorphic and quantum, the emerging hardware platforms differ in the protocols they use and even in the physical forms and degrees of freedom they employ to encode the data.

Yet, fiber optics – the workhorse of digital communication - still awaits the transformation that would enable it to interconnect those diverse platforms into one harmonized network. The fiber of tomorrow will need to translate the data across those platforms1. Integrating on-the-fly data transformation capabilities into fiber optics is likely to require combining photonic and optoelectronic devices and systems directly within the fiber itself.

The realization of high-performance systems in fibers requires embedding various materials and structures, including electronic and photonic components, into the fiber cladding in an ordered, addressable, and scalable manner. The figure of merit for any active device is defined primarily by the architectural precision of its structure. However, whether glass- or polymer-based, monofilament fibers and the materials they encapsulate are shaped from a melt and are thus prone to fluid-dynamics phenomena, such as capillary instability – nonlinear and even chaotic – challenging architectural control. Recently, a variety of material processing techniques have emerged that piggyback on, rather than circumvent, the fluidic phenomena to attain the desired outcome2. There is a niche in the multidimensional space of material-processing parameters where capillary instability predictably drives the self-assembly of functional devices into fibers with tight architectural control3.

When put into use, such architectural control delivers impactful products. Recently, we have made substantial progress in embedding functional architectures into fibers that, in the long run, will deliver fiber-embedded systems for biomedical sensing and treatment, and will help intimately and efficiently interface the emerging high-performance computing platforms, such as quantum and neuromorphic, with the larger Internet.

[1]A. Gumennik, A et al., Chapter 9 in Optical and Electronic Fibers: Emerging Applications and Technological Innovations (Wiley‐VCH GmbH), Edited by L. Wei (2024) 197-224

[2]A. Gumennik & C. Faccini de Lima, Adv. Eng. Mater. 26 (2024) 2400919

[3]C. Faccini de Lima et al., Nature Comm. 14 (2023) 5816