The Role of the Laser-Induced Oxide Layer in the Formation of Laser-Induced Periodic Surface Structures.

Laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) are often present when processing solid targets with linearly polarized ultrashort laser pulses. The different irradiation parameters to produce them on metals, semiconductors and dielectrics have been studied extensively, identifying suitable regimes to tailor its properties for applications in the fields of optics, medicine, fluidics and tribology, to name a few. One important parameter widely present when exposing the samples to the high intensities provided by these laser pulses in air environment, that generally is not considered, is the formation of a superficial laser-induced oxide layer. In this paper, we fabricate LIPSS on a layer of the oxidation prone hard-coating material chromium nitride in order to investigate the impact of the laser-induced oxide layer on its formation. A variety of complementary surface analytic techniques were employed, revealing morphological, chemical and structural characteristics of well-known high-spatial frequency LIPSS (HSFL) together with a new type of low-spatial frequency LIPSS (LSFL with an anomalous orientation parallel to the laser polarization. Based on this input, we performed finite-difference time-domain calculations considering a layered system resembling the geometry of the HSFL along with the presence of a laser-induced oxide layer. The simulations support a scenario that the new type of LSFL is formed at the interface between the laser-induced oxide layer and the non-altered material underneath. These findings suggest that LSFL structures parallel to the polarization can be easily induced in materials that are prone to oxidation.

Optimization of integrated polarization filters.

This study reports on the design of small footprint, integrated polarization filters based on engineered photonic lattices. Using a rods-in-air lattice as a basis for a TE filter and a holes-in-slab lattice for the analogous TM filter, we are able to maximize the degree of polarization of the output beams up to 98% with a transmission efficiency greater than 75%. The proposed designs allow not only for logical polarization filtering, but can also be tailored to output an arbitrary transverse beam profile. The lattice configurations are found using a recently proposed parallel tabu search algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems in integrated photonics.