All-laser-micromachining of ridge waveguides in LiNbO3 crystal for mid-infrared band applications

Abstract The femtosecond laser micromachining of transparent optical materials offers a powerful and feasible solution to fabricate versatile photonic components towards diverse applications. In this work, we report on a new design and fabrication of ridge waveguides in LiNbO3 crystal operating at t...

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Autores principales: Lingqi Li, Weijie Nie, Ziqi Li, Qingming Lu, Carolina Romero, Javier R. Vázquez de Aldana, Feng Chen
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2017
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/0f42654ff2dd4d019558fd4d806bae3e
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Sumario:Abstract The femtosecond laser micromachining of transparent optical materials offers a powerful and feasible solution to fabricate versatile photonic components towards diverse applications. In this work, we report on a new design and fabrication of ridge waveguides in LiNbO3 crystal operating at the mid-infrared (MIR) band by all-femtosecond-laser microfabrication. The ridges consist of laser-ablated sidewalls and laser-written bottom low-index cladding tracks, which are constructed for horizontal and longitudinal light confinement, respectively. The ridge waveguides are found to support good guidance at wavelength of 4 μm. By applying this configuration, Y-branch waveguiding structures (1 × 2 beam splitters) have been produced, which reach splitting ratios of ∼1:1 at 4 μm. This work paves a simple and feasible way to construct novel ridge waveguide devices in dielectrics through all-femtosecond-laser micro-processing.