Crystallographic and Optical Properties of Z-Cut High Index Soft Proton Exchange (HISoPE) LiNbO3 Waveguides

Highly confining nonlinear optical waveguides are extremely interesting for highly efficient and ultracompact nonlinear and/or electro-optical devices. In this paper, we concentrate on correlations between structural and optical properties of channel waveguides on z-cut lithium niobate fabricated using a new waveguide fabrication method, we call HISoPE for high index soft proton exchange, which allows obtaining a guiding layer presenting an index increase as high as 0.1 and a nonlinear coefficient equal to its value in the bulk.