Advanced nanostructured materials for integrated optics

Integrated optics demand waveguides on Si platforms with different funtionalities and thus thin film technologies become essential tools for its development. Incorporating rare-earth ions or metal nanoparticales in dielectric hosts are respectively of interest for producing active media for gain devices or non-linear optical media with a high potential for all-optical switching. In this work, pulsed laser deposition is used to produce these materials with "dopant" distributions controlled within the nanometre scale embedded in a deilectric host. Examples will be given in which the control of this distribution is essential for achieving optimised optical transmission, propagation losses or photoluminescence lifetime. These examples are additionally used to show that controlling the separation between "dopants" becomes a useful tool to provide new insights in the understanding of interaction mechanisms