Single-stripe tunable laser with chirped sampled gratings fabricated by nanoimprint lithography

The fabrication of diffraction gratings of a chirped sampled gratings distributed reflector (CSG-DR) laser by nanoimprint lithography (NIL) has been demonstrated. The diffraction gratings with highly uniform linewidth and period have been successfully fabricated by the combination of the reverse-tone NIL and precise etching techniques. The CSG-DR laser fabricated by NIL shows a sufficiently wide tuning range of 40 nm as we designed. The results of this study indicate that our fabrication process for the sampled gratings utilizing the NIL technique has a high potential for the fabrication of a CSG-DR laser.