Integrated optical waveguides: refractive-index profile control by temperature and electric-field programming

Ion exchange is often used to manufacture integrated optical waveguides in glasses and crystals. The manufacture of low-loss, compact, integrated optical waveguides can be achieved by varying the processing conditions (the temperature and the electric field) during the ion exchange. We have simulated the formation of waveguides in glass with a molten salt silver ion-exchange technique and have shown that, by simply linearly varying the temperature and electric field during processing of waveguides, one can tailor the refractive-index profiles to produce low-loss parabolic and hyperbolic secant dopant profiles or any other generic dopant profile.