Material Assessment of Aerosol Doped Neodymium Silica Waveguide Lasers

Silica-based integrated optical waveguides are receiving increasing attention for applications in future optical communication systems. Based on a combination of silica film deposition and reactive ion etching (RIE), the resulting channel waveguides have a low loss, precisely defined core structure and a low waveguide to fibre coupling loss due to the core dimensions and refractive index matching those of silica-based optical fibres. Of the several silica deposition techniques, flame hydrolysis deposition (FHD) offers the greatest flexibility and gives the possibility of monolithic integration of active and passive functions on a single substrate [ 1,2].