Materials for photonic applications from sol-gel

Several sol-gel materials developed for photonic applications are discussed. These materials include planar and strip waveguides for integrated optics (IO) passive devices, Er doped waveguides for IO amplifiers, films doped with semiconductor quantum dots for optical switching and fullerene doped materials for optical limiting. Sol-gel processing is used to fabricate several types of materials for integrated optics and photonics applications and is shown to be a very versatile technique to obtain inorganic and organic-inorganic materials. They have the advantage of simple deposition processes for coating films. These characteristics are possible for wide development of photonic devices that are based on sol-gel processing.