Naturally-Degradable Photonic Devices with Transient Function by Heterostructured Waxy-Sublimating and Water-Soluble Materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces transient photonic devices made from layered water-soluble and sublimating materials, enabling environmentally friendly, degradable optical systems with applications in imaging and information encoding.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of dry-wet transient materials and devices, demonstrating their use in light emission, imaging, and secure information encoding with full degradability.

Findings

Demonstrated amplified spontaneous emission in heterostructures

Achieved speckle-free full-field imaging with transient devices

Real-time microscopic study of material domain evolution

Abstract

Combined dry-wet transient materials and devices are introduced, which are based on water-dissolvable dye-doped polymers layered onto non-polar cyclic hydrocarbon sublimating substrates. Light-emitting heterostructures showing amplified spontaneous emission are used as illumination sources for speckle-free, full-field imaging, and transient optical labels are realized that incorporate QR codes with stably encoded information. The transient behavior is also studied at the microscopic scale, highlighting the real time evolution of material domains in the sublimating compound. Finally, the exhausted components are fully soluble in water thus being naturally degradable.