Soft-mask fabrication of gallium arsenide nanomembranes for integrated quantum photonics.

We report on the fabrication of quantum photonic integrated circuits based on suspended GaAs membranes. The fabrication process consists of a single lithographic step followed by inductively coupled-plasma dry etching through an electron-beam-resist mask and wet etching of a sacrificial layer. This method does not require depositing, etching, and stripping a hard mask, greatly reducing fabrication time and costs, while at the same time yielding devices of excellent structural quality. We discuss in detail the procedures for cleaning the resist residues caused by the plasma etching and present a statistical analysis of the etched feature size after each fabrication step.