Temporally shaped femtosecond laser pulses as direct patterning method for dielectric materials in nanophotonic applications

Abstract

We present a direct patterning method of dielectric materials via temporally shaped femtosecond laser pulses. A thinfilm waveguide with a 2D periodic pattern of photonic crystals with circular base elements is investigated. We use dielectrics since they are transparent especially in the visible spectral range, but also in UV and near infrared range. Thus, they are very suitable as optical filters in the very same spectral region. Since structuring of non-conductive dielectric materials suffers from charging, the implementation of laser processing as patterning method instead of conventional processing techniques like electron beam lithography or focused ion beams is a very attractive alternative. Despite a low refractive index contrast, we show by numerical results that normal incident of light to the plane of periodicity couples to a waveguide mode and can excite Fano resonances. That makes the device extremely interesting as narrow-band optical filter. Applications of optical filters in the visible and UV range require fabrication of photonic crystal structures in the sub-100 nm range. Temporally shaped femtosecond laser pulses are applied as a novel method for very high precision laser processing of wide band gap materials to create photonic crystal structures in dielectrics. Shaping temporally asymmetric pulse trains enable the production of structures well below the diffraction limit. 1 We combine this process with deposition of a high refractive index layer to achieve the targeted resonant waveguide structure. Additionally, we focus on the rim formation arising by laser processing since this is an important issue for fabrication of photonic crystal arrays with small lattice constants.