Femtosecond laser assisted selective etching of microchannels in lithium niobate

Nwatu, Daniel Tochi; Kip, Detlef; Hasse, Kore

doi:10.1364/oe.500439

Femtosecond laser assisted selective etching of microchannels in lithium niobate

Publication date

2023-11-06

Document type

Forschungsartikel

Author

Nwatu, Daniel Tochi

Kip, Detlef

Hasse, Kore

Organisational unit

Experimentalphysik und Materialwissenschaften

DOI

10.1364/oe.500439

URI

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/19897

Publisher

Optica Publishing Group

Series or journal

Optics Express

ISSN

1094-4087

Periodical volume

31

Periodical issue

23

First page

37618

Last page

37629

Peer-reviewed

✅

Part of the university bibliography

✅

Language

English

Abstract

Here, we report on the fabrication of cm-long microchannels in LiNbO_3 by selective etching of femtosecond laser inscribed tracks using hydrofluoric acid. We achieved a 1 cm long microchannel after 300 h of etching a single track inscribed into the volume along the optical axis of LiNbO_3. Furthermore, we investigated the dependence of the etching behavior on various writing parameters. Highly selective etching with a selectivity up to 10^4 was achieved and a functional relationship between the etched depth and time was found. Thus, our results set the first milestone for future fabrication of 3D-hollow microstructures in the volume of LiNbO_3 combining its outstanding physical properties such as the strong nonlinearity as well as the acousto- and electrooptic properties with both microfluidic and photonic structures in a monolithic setup.

Description

This is an open access article under of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement (https://doi.org/10.1364/OA_License_v2#VOR-OA).

Version

Published version

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Metadata only access