High-repetition rate femtosecond lasers are shown to drive heat accumulation processes that are attractive for rapid writing of low-loss optical waveguides in transparent glasses. A novel femtosecond fiber laser system (IMRA America, FCPA muJewel) providing variable repetition rate between 0.1 and 5 MHz was used to study the relationship between heat accumulation and resulting waveguide properties in fused silica and various borosilicate glasses. Increasing repetition rate was seen to increase the waveguide diameter and decrease the waveguide loss, with waveguides written with 1-MHz repetition rate yielding ~0.2-dB/cm propagation loss in Schott AF45 glass. A finite-difference thermal diffusion model accurately tracks the waveguide diameter as cumulative heating expands the modification zone above 200-kHz repetition rate.
A remarkable phenomenon in ultrafast laser processing of transparent materials, in particular, silica glass, manifested as a change in material modification by reversing the writing direction is observed. The effect resembles writing with a quill pen and is interpreted in terms of anisotropic trapping of electron plasma by a tilted front of the ultrashort laser pulse along the writing direction.
Self-assembled, sub-wavelength periodic structures are induced in fused silica by a tightly focused, linearly polarized, femtosecond laser beam. Two different types of periodic structures, the main one with period (Lambda(E)) in the direction of the laser beam polarization and the second with period (Lambda(k)) in the direction of the light propagation, are identified from the cross-sectional images of the modified regions using scanning electron microscopy. We demonstrate the spatial coherence of these nanogratings in the plane perpendicular to the beam propagation direction. The range of effective pulse energy which could produce nanogratings narrows when the pulse repetition rate of writing laser increases. The period Lambda(E) is proportional to the wavelength of the writing laser and period Lambda(k) in the head of the modified region remains approximately the wavelength of light in fused silica.
Changes to the glass network structure after modification with tightly focused 1043nm, 400fs laser pulses have been studied in Er–Yb doped phosphate glass using in situ confocal Raman microscopy. For femtosecond laser writing conditions that result in heat accumulation, the 710 and 1209cm−1 Raman peaks, which are due to the (POP)sym and (PO2)sym network vibration modes, respectively, shift to both higher and lower wavenumbers. The differences in refractive index are shown to correlate spatially with the 1209cm−1 Raman signal shifts. Systematic shifts in this Raman peak to higher and lower wavenumbers indicate an overall expansion and/or contraction of the phosphate network that depends on the femtosecond laser writing conditions.
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