Demonstration of 3D-Printed Optical Antennas for Pervasive Optical Wireless Communication with Non-Optical, Commercial Materials

We report the successful realization of efficient fluorescent Optical Antennas (OAs) for Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) and Visible Light (VLC) applications by integrating additively manufactured planar slabs, realized using commercial resins devised for non-optical applications, as Fluorescent Concentrators (FCs) in novel receiving stages (RX). FCs have already shown unique opportunities to realize RX stages for OWC/VLC with unique benefits, such as large optical gain (OG), large field of view (FoV) and large optoelectronic bandwidth (BW) [1], [2]. To date, however, they have only been realized by employing dedicated fluorophores and dispersing them in molded, planar substrates or thin films, involving complex realization techniques and often conferring a strong coloured, non-transparent character to the substrates [3]. In our work, we select and test 3 different market-ready materials to realize 3 transparent planar slabs (see Fig. 1a), which are integrated as FC frontends in novel RX stages for VLC and OWC, to efficiently convert and waveguide high-frequency modulated optical signals towards a small-area photodiode with large BW (see Fig. 1b). We first characterize the absorption and emission spectra of the 3 slabs. Then, by employing a fast 410 nm laser source as transmitter (TX), we thoroughly characterize the intrinsic response BW of the 3 different receivers (Fig. 1 c), and their collection efficiency (Fig. 1 d). The OAs are also tested in a complete OWC setup, attaining data rates of 70 Mb/s with On-Off-Keying, NRZ coding (Fig. 1e-f). Our work unveils, for the first time, the possibility to employ standard additive manufacturing materials, with no addition of dedicated fluorophores, to realize transparent, 3d-printed objects suitable to receive and decode OWC and VLC signal. This achievement opens a new avenue in the development and implementation of the IoT paradigm in the 6G architecture [4], boosting the deployment of pervasive OWC and VLC systems in indoor, outdoor and vehicular scenarios.