Abstract

We determine the quality of single films of various oxides, which are deposited on thermally oxidized silicon wafers by reactive low-voltage ion plating (RLVIP), by measuring their optical waveguide losses. We use a prism coupler for inserting the radiation of a wavelength-selectable He–Ne laser into the waveguide and a CCD camera for imaging the light scattered from the surface of the films. The waveguide losses of the RLVIP films are typically of the order of 1 to 10 dB/cm. Some data obtained for TiO₂ layers on thermally grown SiO₂ and RLVIP SiO₂ seem to confirm the presence of an absorbing boundary layer between RLVIP SiO₂ and TiO₂ that has been found in SiO₂–TiO₂ multilayers. The waveguide measurements also reveal unusual index gradients in thick (∼10 μm) single layers of Al₂O₃ derived from multimode effective index calculations.

© 1993 Optical Society of America

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