Irradiation Effects of Swift Heavy Ions Detected by Refractive Index Depth Profiling

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript titled "Irradiation Effects of Swift Heavy Ions Detected by
3 Refractive Index Depth Profiling" by Amekura et al. is a well written paper exploring the use of swift ion irradiation in the development of waveguide. The work expands on previous work and sound fundamental understanding of the microstructural evolution that occurs in this very far from equilibrium processing. Some suggestions to improve the quality of the paper:

1) More details on the ion irradiation conditions need to be included to make the results reproducable. This includes whether the beam was rastered, the ion flux, area irradiated, etc.

2) Similiarly, the SRIM modeling is not detailed including the density, binding energies, etx. A discussion on how SRIM breaks down at these energies should also be discussed.

3) The text in Figure 6 is not legible.

4) The discussion would be strengthened by a paragraph detailing how these experiments will impact the quantum community and what work might be next based on these observations.

Author Response

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Although the authors use the appropriate techniques for investigating refractive index profiles in irradiated samples, I think that their conclusions are not correct, or at least, they need to be clarified.

1.- The authors claim that the only formula used in the article in eq. (2). Nevertheless, along the article there is no mention to the evaluation of volume change after sample irradiation.

2.- When the authors write "fluence", I suppose that they must say "dose" (in ions/cm2 units).

3.- The experimental data presented in figure3b cannot be fitted by the refractive index profile proposed in figure 5. Indeed, for doing that, one should assume an index decrease (dip) situated around 15 microns (and not at 6 microns, as the authors stated), much more in accordance to that predicted by the nuclear stopping range calculated by SRIM.  Therefore, I must conclude that all the simulated index profiles are not correct.

4.- Also, (lines 186-188), the mode of the 10E11 dose cannot be at surface, but buried (as suggested by the RI simulations).

5.- Following that, the RI peak simulated (and not detected, as the authors say in line 223) at 13 um cannot be accessible by prism coupling (this is forbidden by the wide index barrier).

6.- Figure 7 need explanation. How this figure can be obtained? Changing the polarization, in general, one must change the incident angle for feed a waveguide mode.

7.- The scale (in microns) must be added to the images on the right in figure 6.

Overall, I think that, although the data should be correct, the fitted index profiles are not correct. Therefore, I suggest the authors a clear improvement in this respect.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer B

Thank you for giving suggestive comments. Please see the response in the attached file.

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the authors have improved the article.