Micromachining of ridge optical waveguides on top of He+-implanted β-BaB2O4 crystals by femtosecond laser ablation

We report on a technique for the fabrication of ridge optical waveguides on top of beta-BaB2O4 (BBO) crystals. The BBO crystals were first implanted by He+ ions to form planar optical waveguides. In the second step, the femtosecond laser ablation technique was employed for micromachining of ridge-type optical waveguides. A thorough study of material-specific ablation parameters for BBO has been performed in order to achieve ablated structures with smooth sidewalls. A further process of Ar+ ion smoothing in a plasma chamber was used to reduce the sidewall roughness of the ablated ridges from 75 to 35 nm root mean square. We demonstrated optical waveguiding in these femtosecond-ablated plasma-treated waveguides and measured total propagation losses of less than 10 dB/cm at 532 nm, making them suitable for nonlinear- and electro-optical applications. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.