Journal of the European Optical Society - Rapid publications, Vol 9 (2014)

Subsurface disorder and electro-optical properties of proton-exchanged LiNbO3 waveguides produced by different techniques

S. M. Kostritskii, Y. N. Korkishko, V. A. Fedorov, V. P. Mitrokhin, O. G. Sevostyanov, I. M. Chirkova, O. Stepanenko, M. De Micheli

Abstract


It has been established, that proton-exchanged LiNbO3 waveguides have a marked subsurface layer with structural disorder inducing degradation of electro-optical properties of these waveguides. At the same time, such a subsurface disorder is found to be less pronounced in soft proton-exchanged (SPE) waveguides in comparison with annealed proton-exchanged (APE) ones. The experimental samples of phase modulators fabricated by SPE technique exhibit a better electro-optical efficiency compared to the LiNbO3 modulators produced by the standard and improved APE techniques.


© The Authors. All rights reserved. [DOI: 10.2971/jeos.2014.14055]

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