Lithium niobate proton-exchange technology for phase-amplitude modulators

摘要

Abstract: The proton exchange (PE) technology has been applied in the fabrication of a wide bandwidth interferometric modulator in X- cut lithium niobate. The utilization of dilute melt of benzoic acid and lithium benzoate as source in the H-Li exchange process, and the introduction of a subsequent appropriate thermal annealing allow use to obtain a high-quality channel waveguide characterized by high long-term stability, high electro-optical efficiency, low propagation losses, low fiber-waveguide insertion losses and high resistance to the laser radiation induced damage. The main advantages of this modulator in comparison with the similar Ti-induffusion based device are the lower fabrication cost and the possibility to handle higher optical power, allowing higher dynamic range of the signal processing system.!6