Laser-written scalable sapphire integrated photonics platform

In this paper, we demonstrate the integration of photonic devices on sapphire substrates using multi-layer depressed cladding waveguides at both 780 nm and 1550 nm. The devices are up to 10 cm long and written at depths down to 800 µm. The propagation losses for single-mode guiding are ∼ 0.6 dB/cm at 780 nm and ∼ 0.7 dB/cm at 1550 nm. A number of structures have been fabricated with simultaneous single-mode and polarization independent operation: evanescently coupled waveguide arrays, Y-branch splitters, Mach-Zehnder interferometers, and a 2 × 2 directional-coupler. All the devices were fabricated using adaptive optics-assisted femtosecond laser direct writing with a customized laser writing algorithm. This work enables the integration of single-mode sapphire photonics devices in a scalable manner, enabling many applications in communications, imaging, computing, and sensing.