Abstract

Active optical materials in thin film configuration have to be developed to achieve integrated optoelectronic devices for communication technology. Incorporation of rare earth ions to a variety of matrixes permits the construction of planar integrated lasers and amplifiers Specifically, the optical transition in Er³⁺ at 1.53 μm is being widely used for this purpose Several techniques have so far been used to obtain rare-earth doped films Among them, the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) has been proven to give excellent results. Both the matrix and the dopant can be deposited by alternate ablation from the corresponding targets, which allows to control the distribution of the dopant in the matrix. Er-doped amorphous Al₂O₃ thin films grown by this technique consist of a sequence of Er ‘doping layers’ separated by Al₂O₃ layers It has earlier been shown that increasing the in-depth separation of these ‘doping layers’ causes the photoluminescence (PL) lifetime to increase, at a cost of a decrease of the average total Er concentration.¹ The aim of this work is to control the nanoscopic Er distribution by pulsed laser deposition within the ‘doping layers’ in order to achieve both the best PL intensity and lifetime values for large Er concentrations.

© 2000 IEEE