Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T10:37:04.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Soft-Matter Micro-optics

from Part II - Devices and materials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2015

By
Wolfgang Mönch
Edited by
Hans Zappe  and
Claudia Duppé
Wolfgang Mönch
Affiliation:
Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm, Nürnberg, Germany
Hans Zappe
Affiliation:
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
Claudia Duppé
Affiliation:
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
Get access

Summary

This chapter discusses the use of soft condensed matter for the development of novel fabrication and tuning concepts for optical microsystems. With its characteristic optical effects, soft matter offers a large potential in the areas of functionality, fabrication, and assembly in microsystems engineering. The physical basis is the scaling behavior of the interactions involved in such systems. With regard to micro-optics in particular, researchers and engineers have shown considerable creativity in designing and demonstrating microsystems with soft matter in their function-relevant components, leading to a broad number of surprising and successful approaches to tunable, variable, active, or adaptive micro-optical systems.

We will thus focus on soft-matter-based approaches to active micro-optical systems and provide an overview of material that is well suited for tunable micro-optics, for example liquids and polymers. The ensuing sections discuss micro-optical systems based on wetting and elasticity, which represent two important classes of effects that are typical for soft matter. In the last section, we will summarize and conclude the topic from an industrial point of view.

Introduction

At first glance, optics and soft condensed matter do not seem to have much in common: since optics is primarily associated with glass components and precision manufacturing, this naive association excludes liquids and elastic solids as optical materials. A closer investigation, however, reveals several interesting links between these fields. Historical experiments of the nineteenth century by the Swiss physicist Daniel Colladon used water jets to demonstrate light guiding, or illumination effects for aesthetic purposes making use of dyed water in glass vessels. The optical effects generated by water droplets can be observed in our daily lives. Such examples motivate us to take a closer look at soft condensed matter, its characteristic effects, and its applications (both existing and emerging) in micro-optics.

The term soft condensed matter comprises a broad variety of very different materials and excludes gases, plasmas, and crystalline, hard, brittle, mostly inorganic solids, such as ceramics, metals, semiconductors, and dielectric crystals, which are treated in a typical university course of solid state physics. Many of the materials not treated there fall within the domain of soft matter, among them liquids, polymers, colloids, liquid crystals, composites, and biological matter, all of which consist of, or contain, organic molecules as their major constituents.

Type
Chapter
Information
Tunable Micro-optics , pp. 67 - 91
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adamson, A. W. (1990), Physical Chemistry of Surfaces, 5th edn, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.Google Scholar
Aljasem, K., Froehly, L., Seifert, A. & Zappe, H. (2011), ‘Scanning and tunable micro-optics for endoscopic optical coherence tomography’, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 20(6), 1462–1472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arsenault, A. C., Puzzo, D. P., Manners, I. & Ozin, G. A. (2007), ‘Photonic-crystal full-colour displays’, Nature Materials 1, 468–472.Google Scholar
Aschwanden, M. & Stemmer, A. (2006), ‘Polymeric, electrically tunable diffraction grating based on artificial muscles’, Optics Letters 31, 2610–2612.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bäumer, S., ed. (2010), Handbook of Plastic Optics, 2nd edn, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berge, B. (2005), ‘Liquid lens technology: Principle of electrowetting based lenses and applications to imaging’, in 18th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2005) Technical Digest, Miami, Florida, USA, pp. 227–230.Google Scholar
Berge, B. & Peseux, J. (2000), ‘Variable focal lens controlled by an external voltage: An application of electro-wetting’, European Physical Journal E 3, 159–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blum, M., Büeler, M., Grätzel, C., Giger, J. & Aschwanden, M. (2012), ‘Optotune focus tunable lenses and laser speckle reduction based on electroactive polymers’, in Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 8252, pp. 825207–825207–11.
Buehrle, J., Herminghaus, S. & Mugele, F. (2003), ‘Interface profiles near three-phase contact lines in electric fields’, Physical Review Letters 91, 086101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Butt, H.-J., Graf, K. & Kappl, M. (2006), Physics and Chemistry of Interfaces, 2nd revised and enlarged edn, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim.Google Scholar
Chang, Y.-J., Mohseni, K. & Bright, V. M. (2007), ‘Fabrication of a tapered SU-8 structure and effect on sidewall angle for a variable focus microlens using EWOD’, Sensors and Actuators A 136, 546–553.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chavez, J. (2008), Introduction to Nonimaging Optics, CRC Press, Boca Raton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, C.-W. & Tseng, F.-G. (2005), ‘Tunable micro-aspherical lens manipulated by 2d electrostatic forces’, in The 13th International Conference on Solid-State Actuators and Microsystems (Transducers'05): Digest of Technical Papers, Seoul, Korea, pp. 376–379.Google Scholar
Cheng, C.-C. & Yeh, J. A. (2007), ‘Dielectrically actuated liquid lens’, Optics Express 15, 7140–7145.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cho, S., Moon, H. & Kim, C.-J. (2003), ‘Creating, transporting, cutting, and merging liquid droplets by electrowetting-based actuation for digital microfluidic circuits’, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 12(1), 70–80.Google Scholar
Crassous, J., Gabay, C., Liogier, G. & Berge, B. (2004), ‘Liquid lens based on electrowetting: a new adaptive component for imaging applications in consumer electronics’, in W., Jiang & Y., Suzuki, eds, Proceedings of SPIE. Adaptive Optics and Applications III, Vol. 5639, SPIE, pp. 143–148.Google Scholar
Davis, H. T. (1996), Statistical Mechanics of Phases, Interfaces, and Thin Films, VCH Publishers, Inc., New York.Google Scholar
de Gennes, P.-G. (1985), ‘Wetting: statics and dynamics’, Reviews of Modern Physics 57, 827–863.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Gennes, P.-G., Quéré, D. & Brochard-Wyart, F. (2004), Capillarity and Wetting Phenomena. Drops, Bubbles, Pearls, Waves, Springer, New York.
Dong, L., Agarwal, A., Beebe, D. & Jiang, H. (2006), ‘Adaptive liquid microlenses activated by stimuli-responsive hydrogels’, Nature 442, 551–554.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evans, D. F. & Wennerström, H. (1994), The Colloidal Domain. Where Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Technology Meet, VCH Publishers, Inc., New York.Google Scholar
Fainman, Y., Lee, L. P., Psaltis, D. & Yang, C. (2009), Optofluidics: Fundamentals, Devices, and Applications, McGraw-Hill, New York.Google Scholar
Gambin, Y., Legrand, O. & Quake, S. (2006), ‘Microfabricated rubber microscope using soft solid immersion lenses’, Applied Physics Letters 88, 174102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, A. R. & Schmidt, H., eds (2010), Handbook of Optofluidics, CRC Press, Inc., Boca Raton, FL.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, R. A. & Feenstra, B. (2003), ‘Video-speed electronic paper based on electrowetting’, Nature 425, 383–385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heikenfeld, J., Zhou, K., Kreit, E., Raj, B., Yang, S., Sun, B., Milarcik, A. & Schwartz, R. (2009), ‘Electrofluidic displays using young-laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions’, Nature Photonics 3, 292–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hongbin, Y., Guangya, Z., Siong, C. F. & Feiwen, L. (2008), ‘Optofluidic variable aperture’, Optics Letters 33, 548–550.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Israelachvili, J. N. (1991), Intermolecular & Surface Forces, 2nd edition, Academic Press, London.Google Scholar
Jones, R. A. L. (2002), Soft Condensed Matter, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Jones, T., Wang, K.-L. & Yao, D.-J. (2004), ‘Frequency-dependent electromechanics of aqueous liquids: electrowetting and dielectrophoresis’, Langmuir 20, 2813–2818.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knuesel, R., Park, S., Zheng, W. & Jacobs, H. (2012), ‘Self-assembly and self-tiling: Integrating active dies across length scales on flexible substrates’, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 21(1), 85–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koshel, R. J. (2013), Illumination Engineering. Design with Nonimaging Optics, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krogmann, F., Mönch, W. & Zappe, H. (2006), ‘A MEMS-based variable micro-lens system’, Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics 8, S330–S336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krogmann, F., Qu, H., Mönch, W. & Zappe, H. (2008), ‘Push/pull actuation using opto-electrowetting’, Sensors and Actuators A 141, 499–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuiper, S. & Hendriks, B. H. W. (2004), ‘Variable-focus liquid lens for miniature cameras’, Applied Physics Letters 85(7), 1128–1130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landau, L. & Lifschitz, E. (1991), Lehrbuch der Theoretischen Physik. Band VI: Elastizitätstheorie, 7th edn, Akademie Verlag, Berlin.Google Scholar
Leopold, S., Polster, T., Paetz, D., Knoebber, F., Ambacher, O., Sinzinger, S. & Hoffmann, M. (2013), ‘MOEMS tunable microlens made of aluminum nitride membranes’, Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS 12, 023012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liebetraut, P., Petsch, S., Mönch, W. & Zappe, H. (2011), ‘Tunable solid-body elastomer lenses with electromagnetic actuation’, Applied Optics 50(19), 3268–3274.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liebetraut, P., Waibel, P., Nguyen, P. H. C., Reith, P., Aatz, B. & Zappe, H. (2013), ‘Optical properties of liquids for fluidic optics’, Applied Optics 52(14), 3203–3215.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miks, A., Novak, J. & Novak, P. (2013), ‘Algebraic and numerical analysis of imaging properties of thin tunable-focus fluidic membrane lenses with parabolic surfaces’, Applied Optics 52, 2136–2144.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moench, W. & Zappe, H. (2004), ‘Fabrication and testing of micro-lens arrays by all-liquid techniques’, Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics 6(4), 330–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mugele, F. & Baret, J.-C. (2005), ‘Electrowetting: from basics to applications’, Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter 17, R705–R774.Google Scholar
Müller, P., Feuerstein, R. & Zappe, H. (2012), ‘Integrated optofluidic iris’, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 21(5), 1156–1164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, P., Kloss, A., Liebetraut, P., Mönch, W. & Zappe, H. (2011), ‘A fully integrated optofluidic attenuator’, Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering 21, 125017 (14pp).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ozin, G. A. & Arsenault, A. (2005), Nanochemistry. A Chemical Approach to Nanomaterials, RSC Publishing, Cambridge, UK.Google Scholar
Park, S.-I., Xiong, Y., Kim, R.-H., Elvikis, P., Meitl, M., Kim, D.-H., Wu, J., Yoon, J., Yu, C.-J., Liu, Z., Huang, Y., Hwang, K.-c., Ferreira, P., Li, X., Choquette, K. & Rogers, J. A. (2009), ‘Printed assemblies of inorganic light-emitting diodes for deformable and semitransparent displays’, Science 325(5943), 977–981.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Piazza, R. (2011), Soft Matter. The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Ren, H. & Wu, S.-T. (2012), Introduction to Adaptive Lenses, JohnWiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Safran, S. A. (1994), Statistical Thermodynamics of Surfaces, Interfaces, and Membranes, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Schneider, F., Draheim, J., Kamberger, R., Waibel, P. & Wallrabe, U. (2009a), ‘Optical characterization of adaptive fluidic silicone-membrane lenses’, Optics Express 17, 11813–11821.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schneider, F., Draheim, J., Kamberger, R. & Wallrabe, U. (2009b), ‘Process and material properties of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for optical MEMS’, Sensors and Actuators A: Physical 151(2), 95–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, N. R., Abeysinghe, D. C., Haus, J. W. & Heikenfeld, J. (2006), ‘Agile wide-angle beam steering with electrowetting microprisms’, Optics Express 14, 6557–6563.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steckl, A. J. (2007), ‘DNA – a new material for photonics?’, Nature Photonics 1, 3–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sugiura, N. & Morita, S. (1993), ‘Variable-focus liquid-filled optical lens’, Applied Optics 32, 4181–4186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Timoshenko, S. & Woinowsky-Krieger, S. (1959), Theory of Plates and Shells, 2nd edn, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Auckland.Google Scholar
Werber, A. & Zappe, H. (2008), ‘Tunable pneumatic microoptics’, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 17, 1218–1227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, W., Zappe, H. & Seifert, A. (2013), ‘Polyacrylate membranes for tunable liquid-filled microlenses’, Optical Engineering 52, 046601.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Soft-Matter Micro-optics
    • By Wolfgang Mönch, Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm, Nürnberg, Germany
  • Edited by Hans Zappe, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Claudia Duppé, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Tunable Micro-optics
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139506052.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Soft-Matter Micro-optics
    • By Wolfgang Mönch, Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm, Nürnberg, Germany
  • Edited by Hans Zappe, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Claudia Duppé, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Tunable Micro-optics
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139506052.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Soft-Matter Micro-optics
    • By Wolfgang Mönch, Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm, Nürnberg, Germany
  • Edited by Hans Zappe, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Claudia Duppé, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Tunable Micro-optics
  • Online publication: 05 December 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139506052.003
Available formats
×