Photorefractive damage removal in LiNbO3 channel waveguides

摘要

The undesirable photorefractive properties inherent in materials like LiNbO3 and LiTaO3 seriously limit the usefulness of these waveguides, particularly for visible wavelength operation where the high intensities within the guides cause catastrophic damage. The U.K. team reports a new approach whereby ion-beam implantation is used as a post-processing technique that reduces the photorefractive effect in previously fabricated annealed proton exchange channel waveguides in LiNbO3. The researchers say ion-beam implantation dramatically decreased the time dependent transmission losses implying that photorefractivity was greatly reduced. This result is significant, they add, because it provides a simple method for producing non-photorefractive LiNbO3