Theoretical and experimental research on femtosecond laser induced optical modification of quartz

Abstract

Integration optical waveguides can be fabricated by the femtosecond laser inside quartz-based transparent dielectric materials. The complex dielectric function 𝜀( 𝜔) is a core optical parameter for waveguide performances. Ground-state 𝜀( 𝜔) has been calculated in the past. However, the laser-induced ultrafast modification of excited-state 𝜀( 𝜔) at a femtosecond scale was rarely studied. In this work, the electron excitation and lattice structure of quartz under femtosecond laser irradiation within tens of femtoseconds were calculated using the real-time dependent density functional theory (rt-TDDFT) and molecular dynamics (MD), and the excited-state 𝜀( 𝜔) was calculated using the random phase approximation (RPA) theory. Then, the real part ( 𝜀⁽¹⁾( 𝜔)), the imaginary part ( 𝜀⁽²⁾( 𝜔)) and the refractive index 𝑛( 𝜔) were investigated. The redshift of absorption edge was observed with the increase of laser power density. 𝜀⁽¹⁾( 𝜔) and 𝑛( 𝜔) increased in the visible light band and the infrared band as the input laser power density increased indicating a greater polarization capability within a laser field. Besides, optical waveguides with a same diameter were fabricated in a quartz glass by using a femtosecond laser direct writing (FsLDW) system and optical mode fields were measured, also demonstrating that the core layer 𝑛( 𝜔) increased with the increase of laser power, which showed a certain correlation with the femtosecond-scale theoretical calculation results. This work is conducive to understand the ultrafast laser-induced optical modification of quartz and promote the precise fabrication of optical waveguides.

Keywords

Femtosecond laser / Quartz / Complex dielectric function / Refractive index / Optical waveguide

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Nan Wang: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Data curation. Wenju Pei: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xia Wang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis. Lei Wang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62305181, No. 12174211), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2021QF003), Independent Cultivation Program of Innovation Team of Ji’nan City (No. 202333042), the University of Jinan Disciplinary Cross-Convergence Construction Project 2023 (No. XKJC-202307).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.chphma.2025.10.005.

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