Abstract
We investigate the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with ternary zinc phosphate glasses. We explore the viability of ten different glass compositions with different levels of alumina to inscribe optical waveguides via the fs-laser direct writing technique, finding that only samples with [O]/[P] ratios of 3.25 are suitable candidates. We also test a zinc magnesium phosphate glass to fabricate waveguide Bragg gratings in order to generate filters and mirrors with specific spectral properties. Confocal Raman spectroscopy inspection shows that laser-damaged material exhibits a relative intensity decrease and a subtle blue-shift on the 1209 cm-1 Raman peak, which implies a relative reduction on the content of Q(2) tetrahedra species within the glass network thus suggesting a laser-induced depolymerization. In contrast, optical waveguides and smooth laser-induced changes do not exhibit such noticeable structural modifications.
Highlights
The use of ultrashort laser sources for a variety of scientific, medical and technological applications is continuously increasing [1,2,3,4,5]
Over the last two decades, femtosecond laser micromachining inside transparent materials has attracted much attention [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Both pulse shaping and spatial beam shaping are currently broadly investigated in order to improve, control and achieve a better understanding of ultrafast laser materials processing [20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
We inscribed a variety of tracks of modified material inside glass samples with several compositions (Table 1)
Summary
The use of ultrashort laser sources for a variety of scientific, medical and technological applications is continuously increasing [1,2,3,4,5]. The use of high repetition rate lasers allows researchers to exploit heat accumulation effects in order to inscribe low-loss optical waveguides [4, 21, 27, 28]. These heat accumulation effects have been proven to be extremely interesting to generate photonic devices by controlling the ultrafast laser-driven ion migration in glasses [29, 30]. Many commercially available phosphate glasses have been tested exhibiting both negative and positive index changes under fs-laser waveguide writing [28, 33,34,35]
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