Thermal poling of glasses to fabricate masks for ion exchange

It has been demonstrated that thermally poled regions of silicate glasses are capable of blocking penetration of silver ions into the glasses in the course of ion exchange processing. This allows using locally poled regions of the glass surface as thick dielectric masks in the formation of ion exchanged structures, like channel optical waveguides, in glass substrates. This approach provides easy multiplication of the structures and, being based on the thermal electric field imprinting of the masks, allows avoiding both lithography with the use of liquid chemicals and the influence of metal masks on the spatial distribution of the ions penetrating the glass in the ion exchange.