Functionalized Fluorinated Hyperbranched Polymers for Optical Waveguide Applications

In this paper we demonstrate that fluorinated hyperbranched polymers are promising for optical waveguide applications. Their amorphous structure and their low C-H bond content lead to very low losses in the NIR, namely 0.1 dB/cm at 1550 nm. Multiple end-groups enabled by the hyperbranched architecture allow drastic changes of the initial refractive index from 1.450 to 1.638. Photo-crosslinking in the presence of a cationic photoinitiator was achieved by functionalizing the polymer with fluorinated para-hydroxystyrene end-groups.