Fabrication and characterisation of reverse proton exchange optical waveguides in Neodymium doped lithium niobate crystals

Abstract

In this work, the complete fabrication process which combines Proton Exchange (PE) and Reverse Proton Exchange (RPE) in Neodymium doped LiNbO3 channel waveguides is reported. To produce the PE-RPE channel waveguides the fabrication of dielectric SiO2 masks had to be implemented. For this propose, we adopted a technique based on the Ion Plating Plasma Assisted Deposition of SiO2 followed by the standard ultraviolet photolithographic patterning. On the other hand, we determined the main optical and spectroscopic properties of Nd3+ ions in the channel waveguides including the study of the lifetime as function as the polarisation.