Fabrication of photonic devices in heavy metal oxide glass by femtosecond laser direct writing

Abstract

Femtosecond laser can induce a permanent refractive index change inside various transparent materials via multiphoton absorption. This technique also opens up new possibilities for fabricating photonic devices in highly nonlinear glasses such as heavy metal oxide glass (HMO) which will be key to the development of all-optical switches and, in combination with thermal poling, to frequency converters and electro-optic modulators. Since self-focusing occurs in HMO glasses before reaching the optical breakdown threshold owing to the large n2, waveguide writing by femtosecond laser is challenging and so far waveguides at 633 nm have been achieved in HMO glass only outside of the region of filamentary propagation. In this paper, for the first time to our best knowledge, we report on the fabrication of high quality, low loss, channel waveguides and passive waveguide components at 1.5µm in bulk 12.5Bi glass without introducing self-focusing.

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