Optical ridge waveguides in Yb:YAG laser crystal produced by combination of swift carbon ion irradiation and femtosecond laser ablation

•Ridge waveguides fabrication in Yb:YAG crystal by C ion irradiation and laser ablation.•Acceptable guiding properties of waveguides after thermal annealing.•Fluorescence properties of Yb3+ ions almost unchanged after ion irradiation.

We report on the fabrication of optical ridge waveguides in ytterbium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Yb:YAG) single crystal by applying swift C5+ ion irradiation and the followed femtosecond laser ablation. The planar waveguide layer is first produced by C5+ ion irradiation and the laser ablation is used to microstructure the planar waveguide surface to construct ridge structures. The lowest propagation loss of the ridge waveguide has been determined to be ~2.1 dB/cm. From the confocal micro-fluorescence and micro-Raman spectra obtained from the waveguide regions, the intensities, positions and widths of the emission-line peaks had no obvious changes with respect to those from the bulks, which indicate that C5+ ion irradiation does not affect the bulk-related properties of the Yb:YAG crystal significantly in the waveguide regions. The results obtained in this work suggest potential applications of the Yb:YAG ridge waveguides as integrated laser sources.