Abstract

Soft glasses, such as soda lime are the often used in waveguide fabrication by ion exchange. They are also cheap, readily available, and are potentially a base material for active components in fiber-to-the-home systems. Therefore, waveguide modulators based on poled soda lime glass are of great interest. In this work we demonstrate that it is possible to induce a large second-order optical nonlinearity in soda lime and borosilicate glass with the electro-thermal poling procedure described by Myers et al¹. We also demonstrate a scheme based on poling to record single-mode waveguides in soda lime.

© 1997 Optical Society of America