Optofluidic Technologies

The integration of fluid with optics has long been recognized for researchers. For example, Liquid telescope mirrors and optical waveguides with liquid core have been developed for more than a hundred years ago. To day, Optofluidics is an emerging area of research that integrates nanophotonics with microfluids onto the same platform. The unique properties of fluids in micro and nano scale can be exploited to design new optical devices. With optofluidics idea, several optical devices including optical and microfluidics elements can be inteagrted on a single chip.The most optical components shus as light soures, lens, waveguides and optical sensors which previously were separately made at now these elemntes can be integrated in the same platform, known as ‘lab-on-a-chip’. For instance, in photonic crystals and micro-structure photonic crystal fibers, the tunable and reconfigurable devices such as the slow- light photonic crystal waveguide, optical filters, optical switches and optical sensors can be directly created by infiltration of fluid into selected air holes and localy precise control it.