LiNbO3 blazed grating fabricated by reactive ion-beam etching

Abstract

A guided-wave acousto-optic device will certainly serve important functions such as deflection, modulation and switching of laser light beams in future optical communication and processing systems. We had experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, a high-performance guided-wave acousto-optic light beam deflector by employing blazed grating couplers as shown in Fig.11. In order to realize their high coupling efficiency, the blazed grating couplers had been developed by the reactive ion-beam etching(RIBE) technique using holographically produced photoresist gratings as masks2.