Recent research and progress in photonic devices and materials

Due to the rapid progress in materials science over the two last decades, many important results have been obtained for photonic materials and new photonic devices have been demonstrated. In this review, we briefly describe results which have been published over the last ten years and results which will influence the future. We concentrate our review on polymers and semiconductor materials. We have excluded optical properties which are based on only manipulations of nanostructures with two exceptions: porous silicon and quantum well infrared detectors. For polymers, we discuss electroluminescence, linear and nonlinear phenomena, photochromism, liquid crystal electro-optics and polymer optical waveguides. Polymers have many advantages, but also disadvantages which motivate us to cover other research directions for photonic materials, such as erbium doped materials, porous silicon, II-VI wide bandgap and nitride based semiconductor materials. We finish this review with a discussion on infrared technology to emphasis also the importance of packaging for photonic devices.