Chalcogenide glass photonic devices

The paper investigates both conventional "top-down" engineering approaches for chalcogenide glass-based photonic chip fabrication using contact printing and reactive ion etching as well as an alternative method for smaller structure that uses a focused ion beam (FIB) mill. This latter approach provides a versatile, one-step method of patterning chalcogenide films at the nanometer scale to create photonic crystals, waveguide tapers, gratings, micro-ring resonators, etc, whereas conventional pattern transfer and ICP reactive ion etching (RIE) allows larger structures to be fabricated.