Room temperature direct bonding of LiNbO3 crystal layers and its application to high-voltage optical sensing

LiNbO3 is a crystal widely used in photonics and acoustics, for example in electro-optic modulation, nonlinear optical frequency conversion, electric field sensing and surface acoustic wave filtering. It often needs to be combined with other materials and used in thin layers to achieve the adequate device performance. In this paper, we investigate direct bonding of LiNbO3 crystals with other dielectric materials, such as Si and fused silica (SiO2), and we show that specific surface chemical cleaning, together with Ar or O2 plasma activation, can be used to increase the surface free energy and achieve effective bonding at room temperature. The resulting hybrid material bonding is very strong, making the dicing and grinding of LiNbO3 layers as thin as 15 µm possible. To demonstrate the application potentials of the proposed bonding technique, we have fabricated and characterized a high-voltage field sensor with high sensitivity in a domain inverted and bonded LiNbO3 waveguide substrate.