Creating a second order nonlinearity and a waveguide in soft glasses by poling

Abstract

Soft glasses, such as soda lime are the often used in waveguide fabrication by ion exchange. They are also cheap, readily available, and are potentially a base material for active components in fiber-to-the-home systems. Therefore, waveguide modulators based on poled soda lime glass are of great interest. In this work we demonstrate that it is possible to induce a large second-order optical nonlinearity in soda lime and borosilicate glass with the electro-thermal poling procedure described by Myers et al1. We also demonstrate a scheme based on poling to record single-mode waveguides in soda lime.