Fabrication of polarization-independent waveguides deeply buried in crystal using aberration-corrected femtosecond laser direct writing

2016/11/04 by Peng Wang, Jia Qi, Wang, Peng +9
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #physics.ins-det

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1611.02153

15 pages, 4 figures

arxiv created 2016/11/04 · arxiv updated 2016/11/08

Abstract

Writing optical waveguides with femtosecond laser pulses provides the capability of forming three-dimensional photonic circuits for manipulating light fields in both linear and nonlinear manners. To fully explore this potential, large depths of the buried waveguides in transparent substrates are often desirable to facilitate achieving vertical integration of waveguides in a multi-layer configuration, which, however, is hampered by rapidly degraded axial resolution caused by optical aberration. Here, we show that with the correction of the spherical aberration, polarization-independent waveguides can be inscribed in a nonlinear optical crystal lithium niobate (LN) at depths up to 1.4 mm, which is more than one order of magnitude deeper than the waveguides written with aberration uncorrected femtosecond laser pulses. Our technique is beneficial for applications ranging from miniaturized nonlinear light sources to quantum information processing.

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