SELF-WRITING A WAVE-GUIDE IN GLASS USING PHOTOSENSITIVITY

We demonstrate theoretically that photosensitivity can be used to create a channel waveguide within a uniform slab of germane-silicate glass from an incident Gaussian beam on the time scale of a few minutes. We refer to this process as self-writing because the writing beam is simultaneously guided by the waveguide during the writing process. A one photon photosensitivity process is considered here; the techniques used generalize directly to two photon processes.