Potential and challenges of sol-gel materials for erbium-doped amplifiers

摘要

Abstract: Sol-gel materials have been widely used for the fabrication of micro-optical devices during the last decade. Motivation for the sol-gel processing has been the low cost and a large variety of fabrication techniques and material properties. One of the interesting possibilities has been to use sol-gel glasses as an erbium host for integrated optics amplifiers. Several research results have been published, but sol-gel processing has not yet proven its potential for efficient devices in this important and rapidly advancing field. There are still some problems to be solved, such as the removal of residual water from sol-gel matrices and the process reliability and reproducibility. In this paper, we review the present status of the sol-gel materials and discuss their potential and challenges for the erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers.!29