Unitary microcapiliary and waveguide structure and method of fabrication

Abstract

Fabrication techniques for forming arbitrarily shaped fluid capillaries at dimensions below 1 μm and for forming optical waveguides in the same devices with the same fabrication processes include methods to make integral optical waveguide/fluid-flow systems for greater miniaturization, integration and parallelism of optical excitation and detection systems for the sampling of small volumes. Capillaries with widths below 1 μm dimensions are fabricated using photolithography and reactive ion etching on glass substrates or by provision of a sacrificial layer, having the configuration desired for a microchannel, covered by a high refractive index material in which a waveguide is formed. Removal of the sacrificial layer produces a microchannel aligned with the waveguide. Dye labeled DNA molecules are driven electrophoretically through the micrometer size channels light emission from and individual molecules can be observed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.