Three-dimensional femtosecond laser nanolithography of crystals

By A. Ródenas, Min Gu, G. Corrielli, P. Paié, S. John, A. Kar, Roberto Osellame. Nature Photonics, 2018

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

So far, nanostructuring of hard optical crystals has been exclusively limited to their surface, as stress-induced crack formation and propagation render high-precision volume processes ineffective1,2. Here, we show that the rate of nanopore chemical etching in the popular laser crystals yttrium aluminium garnet and sapphire can be enhanced by more than five orders of magnitude (from <0.6 nm h−1 to ~100 µm h−1) by the use of direct laser writing, before etching. The process makes it possible to produce arbitrary three-dimensional nanostructures with 100 nm feature sizes inside centimetre-scale laser crystals without brittle fracture. To showcase the potential of the technique we fabricate subwavelength diffraction gratings and nanostructured optical waveguides in yttrium aluminium garnet and millimetre-long nanopores in sapphire. The approach offers a pathway for transferring concepts from nanophotonics to the fields of solid-state lasers and crystal optics.Direct laser writing is shown to dramatically enhance the chemical etch rate of laser crystals yttrium aluminium garnet and sapphire, allowing nanostructuring.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computational Mechanics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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