Optical amplifier made by reporting an Er³⁺/Yb³⁺-codoped glass layer on an ion-exchanged passive glass substrate by wafer bonding

Abstract

Thanks to the maturing of rare-earths highly-doped materials, erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers (EDWAs) present a compact alternative to fibre amplifiers. While ion-exchanged EDWAs implemented on glass substrates provide the best passive characteristics, EDWAs based on thin films technologies offer higher integration degree and amplification efficiencies. This paper proposes the realization of an EDWA in a new configuration which combines all these advantages. Indeed, this optical amplifier consists of an erbium/ytterbium-codoped glass guiding layer reported on an ion-exchanged strip formed on a passive glass substrate. The electromagnetic principle of operation of this hybrid structure is presented. Then, all technological steps of realization are detailed including the report of the active layer by a low-temperature wafer bonding process. Finally, passive and active characterizations allow demonstrating the single mode operation and the amplification efficiency of the hybrid waveguide. Indeed, a high gain coefficient of 3.66±0.25 dB/cm is obtained in the 1.16-cm-long hybrid amplifier.

Hybrid integrated optical waveguides in glass for enhanced visible photoluminescence of nanoemitters

“…These waveguides present many interesting advantages, such as low loss and low birefringence, low fabrication cost, compatibility with standard optical fibers, and high stability [32][33][34]. These photonic structures have been used to develop passive devices like interferometers or multiplexers [35,36] as well as active devices, such as lasing amplifying media [37] and lasers [38,39] based on Erbium ion doping.…”