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Characterization of Sol-Gel Thin-Film Waveguides

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Handbook of Sol-Gel Science and Technology

Abstract

Integrated optics is a branch of photonics allowing sophisticated and innovative solutions to many problems. As glasses exhibit many useful characteristics such as relatively low cost, excellent transparency, high threshold to optical damage, and easiness of doping with active and functional atoms and oxides, glass optical waveguides represent one of the simplest and most attractive building blocks over which photonic integrated circuits can be fabricated.

Sol–gel technology has proved to be suitable to produce high-quality optical waveguides by single- and multilayer deposition. An accurate characterization of the produced waveguides is necessary in order to establish a correlation between the final properties and the parameters of the deposition process and hence to optimize the design and fabrication of the waveguides. Here a brief overview of the measurement techniques for sol–gel passive and active waveguides is presented.

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Acknowledgments

The collaboration and the useful discussions with S. Berneschi, G. Nunzi Conti, S. Pelli at IFAC CNR (Sesto Fiorentino) and A. Chiasera, A. Chiappini, and M. Ferrari at IFN CNR (Trento) are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to Alessandro Carpentiero (IFN CNR) for drawing some of the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi, 00184, Rome, Italy

    Giancarlo C. Righini

  2. Nello Carrara Institute of Applied Physics, CNR, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino – Firenze, Italy

    Giancarlo C. Righini

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  1. Giancarlo C. Righini
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Correspondence to Giancarlo C. Righini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA

    Lisa Klein

  2. Madrid, Spain

    Mario Aparicio

  3. City University of New York, New York, USA

    Andrei Jitianu

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Righini, G.C. (2016). Characterization of Sol-Gel Thin-Film Waveguides. In: Klein, L., Aparicio, M., Jitianu, A. (eds) Handbook of Sol-Gel Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19454-7_46-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19454-7_46-1

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