Creation of microchannels in a photosensitive As_2S_3 slab waveguide

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Abstract
We report the creation of microchannels in a photosensitive material, the arsenic trisulfide As2S3. We show that microchannels are created through the process of self-writing and are highly sensitive to the photosensitivity of the material as well as the quality of the incident wave front. The very high photosensitivity of As2S3 allows the self-written waveguide to become much smaller than the incident beam. We present a numerical analysis based on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation that accounts well for the diversity of the microchannels that were experimentally observed and shows that they can actually guide light.