Photorefractive response and optical damage of LiNbO3 optical waveguides produced by swift heavy ion irradiation

A coupled effect of nuclear and electronic energy loss on ion irradiation damage in lithium niobate

“…In the past several decades, much of research attentions have been carried out to understand the performance evolution of LiNbO 3 crystal in an irradiation environment and applications of property modification by ion irradiation in this material [1][2][3][4]. So far, the physical mechanism of the irradiation damage induced by the nuclear energy loss due to elastic collisions between energetic ions and target nuclei has been well understood [5][6][7][8], and recent studies have also revealed that LiNbO 3 crystal is very sensitive to ionizing irradiation and can be readily damaged due to electronic excitation primarily produced by inelastic collisions between ions and target electrons, which could be reasonably explained utilizing the thermal spike model [8][9][10][11] or models based on the accumulation of radiation-induced point defects (defect-assisted phase transition) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Moreover, ion-beam-induced plastic deformation (atomic rearrangement provoked by electronic excitation and ionization) has been found in completely-disordered metallic glasses, but not crystalline metals [19,20], which reveals that the material in its amorphous phase would be more sensitive to the electronic energy loss than in its crystalline phase.…”

Optical Waveguides Fabricated by Ion Implantation/Irradiation: A Review Optical Waveguides Fabricated by Ion Implantation/Irradiation: A Review

“…This study opened the possibility of fine tuning the refractive index by a suitable control of the fluence. Moreover, Villarroel et al (Villarroel et al, 2009) investigated the photorefractive behavior of this type of optical waveguides. They determined an electrooptic coefficient r 33 = 18.1±0.5 pm/V for these guides and also studied their recording and light-induced and dark erasure of holographic gratings, as well as the optical beam degradation in single-beam configuration, finding that their damage thresholds are of the same order but a factor of 2-3 greater than that of -phase guides commonly used in nonlinear applications.…”

Analysis and optimization of propagation losses in LiNbO3 optical waveguides produced by swift heavy-ion irradiation

“…Moreover, low irradiation fluence is sufficient (~10 14 cm -2 ) to produce the waveguides, so that the fabrication time may be reduced up to two orders of magnitude in comparison with the implantation case. Finally, good nonlinear optical and photorefractive properties have been recently reported [3,7,8]. However, the preliminary reported values for PL yielded values ranging between 1-10 dB/cm [1,8], which are still high for many applications, leaving much room for improvement and optimization.…”