UV poling of pure fused silica by high-intensity femtosecond radiation

Slattery, S.A., Nikogosyan, D.N., Corbari, C. and Kazansky, P.G. (2005) UV poling of pure fused silica by high-intensity femtosecond radiation. 31st European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2005), Glasgow, UK. 25 - 29 Sep 2005. pp. 311-312 .

Abstract

The possibility of inducing a second-order nonlinearity (SON) in glass by poling has some very intriguing possibilities for fibre optics in particular and photonics in general, as it has opened the way for creating different built-in devices in a standard telecom fibre; amongst them modulators, switches and harmonic generators.
The method of UV poling, first realized by Fujiwara et al. [1], consists of the irradiation of highly Ge-doped (15.7 mol.%) fused silica glass by nanosecond 193 nm laser pulses in the presence of an applied electric field of 100-300 kV/cm. Fujiwara et al. reported the induction of a nonlinear second-order coefficient as high as 3.4 pm/V. In this investigation [2], we tried to repeat these experiments using a high-intensity UV femtosecond laser source and undoped fused silica samples, excited by a two-photon mechanism.
After irradiation, we observed a strong second-harmonic (SH) signal in the areas of the sample that had been subjected both to the electric field and to the UV light. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first experimental demonstration of UV poling in undoped fused silica.

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