The universality of filamentation-caused challenges of ultrafast laser energy deposition in semiconductors

Light propagation in semiconductors is the cornerstone of emerging disruptive technologies holding considerable potential to revolutionize telecommunications, sensors, quantum engineering, healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Sky-high optical nonlinearities make these materials ideal platforms for photonic integrated circuits. The fabrication of such complex devices could greatly benefit from in-volume ultrafast laser writing for monolithic and contactless integration. Ironically, as exemplified for Si, nonlinearities act as an efficient immune system self-protecting the material from internal permanent modifications that ultrashort laser pulses could potentially produce. While nonlinear propagation of high-intensity ultrashort laser pulses has been extensively investigated in Si, other semiconductors remain uncharted. In this work, we demonstrate that filamentation universally dictates ultrashort laser pulse propagation in various semiconductors. The effective key nonlinear parameters obtained strongly differ from standard measurements with low-intensity pulses. Furthermore, the temporal scaling laws for these key parameters are extracted. Temporal-spectral shaping is finally proposed to optimize energy deposition inside semiconductors. The whole set of results lays the foundations for future improvements, up to the point where semiconductors can be selectively tailored internally by ultrafast laser writing, thus leading to countless applications for in-chip processing and functionalization, and opening new markets in various sectors including technology, photonics, and semiconductors.