Design and development of low-cost room temperature electric field poling system for the fabrication of quasi-phase matching devices

We discuss the construction of a low-cost room-temperature electric field poling system and the fabrication of high-quality periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) devices. The various poling parameters of the indigenously developed quasi-phase matching (QPM) fabrication facility are studied and optimised for the wastage- / breakage-free device fabrication. Furthermore, we present a simple way to monitor the domain reversal process in the poling system using a crossed polariser arrangement. It has been observed that the pulse-by-pulse poling process is more favourable for monitoring the domain reversal and for estimating the exact poling pulse required for the fabrication of (1 : 1) duty cycle PPLN devices. In addition to the fabrication of PPLN, we further discuss the quality checking of the fabricated devices using a simple far-field diffraction experiment.