Recent Progress in Ion Beam Fabrication of Integrated Optical Elements

Planar optical waveguides and Bragg gratings were designed and written in various optical crystals with medium energy ion implantation. Some examples of the fabricated integrated optical elements are presented in this article: Planar optical waveguides fabricated in Er: LiNbO3 crystal by irradiation with 5 MeV N3+ ions, and Bragg gratings fabricated by multi-energy implantation into a silicon substrate with N+ ions in the 800 keV - 3.5 MeV energy range. The SRIM code was used for planning the optical elements. The ion implanted optical elements were tested by spectroscopic ellipsometry and visible and infrared reflectometry. The results show that the proposed fabrication methods can produce integrated optical elements of adequate parameters.