Researchers at Melbourne's Swinburne University developed a high-quality continuous graphene oxide thin film that has a record-breaking optical nonlinearity. The film may be suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices - useful for communication, biomedcine and photonic computing.
To create this new film, the researchers first spin-coated a graphene-oxide solution on a glass substrate. They then used a laser to create microstructures on the graphene oxide film to tune the nonlinearity of the material. Now they have a platform to fabricate optical components with desired nonlinearity - and all on the same graphene sheet without the need to integrate different components.
Last year, researchers from the same University developed a way to record holographic coding in a graphene oxide polymer composite using a similar laser technique.