Abstract

It is known that implantation of dopants in amorphous silica increases the refractive index, and therefore may lead to the formation of an optical waveguide¹. The ion implantation is usually carried out at energies of a few hundred keV, yielding waveguides with losses of the order of 1 dB/ст. In this work, we used much higher energies (3 and 5 MeV) to implant Germanium in pure synthetic fused silica². The objective is to obtain a planar waveguide which would resemble the core of a standard Ge-doped single mode optical fiber, and to study the photosensitive effects which have been observed in these fibers³. We have already shown that these waveguides are very photosensitive to ultraviolet light from a KrF excimer laser². The new results reported here concern annealing experiments, controlled bleaching, and photoluminescence of these samples.

© 1992 Optical Society of America