Fabrication of photonic devices directly written within glass using a femtosecond laser

Abstract

We present a novel method for three-dimensional optical splitter that have U-grooves, which are used for fiber alignment, within a fused silica glass using near-IR femtosecond laser pulses. The fiber aligned optical splitter has a low insertion loss, less than 4 dB, including an intrinsic splitting loss of 3 dB and excess loss due to the passive alignment of a single-mode fiber. The output field pattern is presented, demonstrating the splitting ratio of the optical splitter is approximately 1:1. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the femtosecond laser writing of periodic patterns by fabricating the submicron line and dot patterns inside the silica glass, which is applicable to 3-D optical memory. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.