Abstract

In the past few decades, 3D direct writing with focused femtosecond laser pulses has emerged as a technique for microfabrication inside transparent dielectrics like fused silica. It has been demonstrated that the control and the confinement of the non-linear interaction can lead to a wide variety of modifications: from a small uniform change of the refractive index to structural modifications opening the way to applications like optical memory encoding, optical waveguide and/or microfluidic channel fabrication [1-3]. The purpose of our study is to extend these 3D fabrication capabilities to semiconductors, a domain that has still not been exploited. We specially concentrate on silicon (Band Gap=1.1 eV) which remains the basis material for microelectronics and telecommunication applications. For comparison, we perform also the experiments on fused silica (Band Gap=9 eV) and various other materials with band gap varying from 1.1 to 13.6 eV.

© 2013 IEEE