Femtosecond laser fabrication of birefringent directional couplers as polarization beam splitters in fused silica

Integrated polarization beam splitters based on birefringent directional couplers are demonstrated. The devices are fabricated in bulk fused silica glass by femtosecond laser writing (300 fs, 150 nJ at 500 kHz, 522 nm). The birefringence was measured from the spectral splitting of the Bragg grating resonances associated with the vertically and horizontally polarized modes. Polarization splitting directional couplers were designed and demonstrated with 0.5 dB/cm propagation losses and -19 dB and -24 dB extinction ratios for the polarization splitting.