Laser micromachining of active and passive photonic integrated circuits

This thesis describes the development of advanced laser resonators and applications of laser-induced micromachining for photonic circuit fabrication. Two major advantages of laser-induced micromachining are direct patterning and writing on large areas of substrates at high speed following the exposure of laser light, without using complicated photomask steps. For passive photonic devices fabrication, a novel femtosecond laser with unprecedented low repetition rates of 4 MHz is demonstrated to generate high intensity pulses, as high as 1.25 MW with 100 nJ pulse energies and 80 fs pulse durations directly from this laser resonator, without using any active devices or amplifiers. These high intensity pulses are applied to transparent glass materials to demonstrate micromachining of waveguides, gratings, couplers, and three dimensional waveguides and their beam couplings. Active and passive semiconductor devices can be monolithically integrated by employing high energy laser pulses to locally disorder quantum well regions. The 45 nm bandgap shifts at 1.55 ptm with a standard Q-switched Nd:YAG laser at 535 nm are realized. Finally, unidirectional semiconductor ring lasers for high-density integration are developed as a potential application to photonic integrated circuits. Hybrid semiconductor S-crossover and retro-reflected ring lasers, as prototypes for unidirectional operation, are built and result in up to 21.5 dB and 24.5 dB of counter-mode suppression ratio, respectively, which is in good agreement with theoretical predictions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Cho, Seong-Ho, 1966-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rajeev J. Ram.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/30086

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/30086