Designable buried waveguides in sapphire by proton implantation

Buried and stacked planar as well as buried single and parallel channel waveguides are fabricated in sapphire by proton implantation. Good control of the implantation parameters provides excellent confinement of the guided light in each structure. Low propagation losses are obtained in fundamental-mode, buried channel waveguides without postimplantation annealing. Choice of the implantation parameters allows one to design mode shapes with different ellipticity and/or mode asymmetry in each orthogonal direction, thus demonstrating the versatility of the fabrication method. Horizontal and vertical parallelization is demonstrated for the design of one- or two-dimensional waveguide arrays in hard crystalline materials.