Fabrication and characterization of femtosecond laser written waveguides in chalcogenide glass

The authors describe the fabrication of buried waveguides in a highly nonlinear chalcogenide glass, gallium lanthanum sulfide, using focused femtosecond laser pulses. Through optical characterization of the waveguides, they have proposed a formation mechanism and provide comparisons to previous work. Tunneling has been identified as the dominant nonlinear absorption mechanism in the formation of the waveguides. Single mode guidance at 633 nm has been demonstrated. The writing parameters for the minimum propagation loss of 1.47 dB/cm are 0.36 uJ pulse energy and 50 um/s scanning speed.