Fabrication and characterization of zirconium — Doped Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate

Lithium niobate is one of the most important optical materials due to its excellent nonlinear optical properties, its wide transparency window and its chemical stability. As this material is ferroelectric, its domain structure can be engineered using the well - known technique of electric field poling through patterned electrodes. This possibility allows realizing highly efficient nonlinear optical devices characterized by a periodic inversion of the spontaneous polarization (Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate, PPLN) based on the Quasi Phase Matching (QPM) scheme.