Transcription of domain patterns in near-stoichiometric magnesium-doped lithium niobate

Recently, light-induced domain reversal has been developed to a promising method for domain engineering, but the depth of reversed domain is only of several tens of microns, which greatly limits its practical applications. In this Letter, we fabricated domain patterns on the -z face of 1.0 mol % Mg doped near-stoichiometric lithium niobate with the assistance of a focal 532 nm laser, and then succeeded to transcribe these domain patterns from the -z to the +z face by applying external field without laser illumination. The transcribed domains have much larger depths, can sustain more than 100 times of the transcription cycles without large deformation, and can be erased by one transcription cycle with illumination of 532 nm laser. Finally, a light-induced ferroelectric domain transcription model was proposed. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3518474]