Low loss 4He+ implanted LiNbO3 waveguide produced by transient annealing

The fabrication of planar optical waveguides in LiNbO3 using 4He+ implantation requires the samples to be annealed in an oxygen flow after implantation to remove the damage from the guiding layer and to replace oxygen loss during implantation. This letter describes, for the first time, the use of transient thermal annealing to process LiNbO3, and the results show that with this short time anneal, the quality of these waveguides has improved significantly giving an attenuation of 0.2 dB/cm at 0.633 μm.