Abstract

Planar waveguide lasers and amplifiers have been demonstrated in erbium doped glasses fabricated by various techniques.¹-⁴ In addition to the low waveguide propagation loss which was realized, spectroscopic properties of the doped glasses such as emission cross section and fluorescent lifetime are also important to achieve high gain. Phosphate glass is known as an excellent rare-earth host material in terms of its large emission cross section, and the weak interaction among rare-earth ions which causes concentration quenching. Therefore, it should be possible to fabricate waveguide lasers of relatively short waveguide length with high Er³⁺ concentration. We fabricated a channel waveguide on an Er³⁺ doped phosphate laser glass (Kigre Q89) by a dry silver-film ion exchange technique,⁵ and characterized its gain properties.

© 1995 IEEE