Glass material is a fundamental material used extensively in various areas of society. It is expected that further functional improvement of this type of material will be required in the future so as to meet the needs of high-capacity and high-speed data transmission in information communications systems as well as to reduce the size, weight and energy consumption of various devices. Unlike with crystalline materials, the selection range of the composition of glass materials is wide and continuous and their structural degree of freedom is high. Moreover, various combinations of glass composition and structure are available. For these reasons, it is believed that glass materials have potentially beneficial characteristics and functions. One way to effectively derive such potential characteristics and functions inherent to glass materials is to produce heterogeneous phases, in which the physical characteristics differ from those of base glass materials, within the base glass material so as to actively derive new functions from it. For the development of such basic technologies, the "Nanotechnology Glass Project" was carried out.
In this project, the basic technologies obtained from the Nanotechnology Glass Project will be further developed into manufacturing technologies. The objective of the project is to improve device characteristics through higher machining accuracy and to significantly reduce production costs by achieving higher processing speed with the combination of femtosecond laser and spatial light modulation technologies.
The project also intends to demonstrate the effectiveness of highly efficient three-dimensional optical device processing technology by working on three-dimensional optical device technology and three-dimensional optical circuit waveguide device technology as sample applications of the three-dimensional processing system assuming actual application to specific devices.
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