Femtosecond laser fabrication of black quartz for infrared photodetection applications

Quartz tuning forks have been recently employed as infrared photodetectors in tunable laser diode spectroscopy because of their high responsivities and fast response time. As for all sensitive elements employed for photodetection, the main drawback is the limited bandwidth of their absorption spectrum. For quartz crystals, the high absorptance for wavelengths above 5 µm guarantees excellent performance in the mid-infrared range, that cannot be easily extended in the visible/near-infrared range because of its transparency from 0.2 to 5 µm. In this work, we report on the development of a laser surface functionalization process to enhance the optical absorption of quartz crystals, named hereafter Black Quartz, in the 1-5 µm spectral range. Black Quartz consists of surface modification of quartz crystal by ultra-fast-pulsed-laser-processing to create localized matrices-like patterns of craters on top. The surface modification decreases the transmittance of quartz in the 1-5 µm range from > 95% down to < 10%, while the transmittance above 5 µm remains unchanged. The Black Quartz process was applied on two quartz-tuning-forks mounted in a tunable laser diode spectroscopy sensor for detecting two water vapor absorption features, one in the near infrared and the other one in the mid-infrared. A comparable responsivity was estimated in detecting both absorption features, confirming the extension of the operation in the near-infrared range. This works represents an important and promising step towards the realization of quartz-based photodetector with high and flat responsivity in the whole infrared spectral range.