Photonic wires sidewall roughness measures using AFM capabilities

Within the last years, interest in photonic wires and photonic crystals grew due to their demonstrated ability of controlling light propagation and characteristics. One of the limitations of such devices is due to the induced roughness during the fabrication process. Generally, an increase in roughness leads to loss increase thus limiting the propagation length and postponing the commercialization of such structures. In this paper we present a new algorithm for measuring the sidewall roughness of our devices based on atomic force microscope (AFM) approach. Using this algorithm, the roughness can be quantified and thus actions in decreasing it can be taken improving the device's performance.