Enhanced Optical Properties of Germanate and Tellurite Glasses Containing Metal or Semiconductor Nanoparticles

Abstract

Germanium- and tellurium-based glasses have been largely studied due to their recognized potential for photonics. In this paper, we review our recent studies that include the investigation of the Stokes and anti-Stokes photoluminescence (PL) in different glass systems containing metallic and semiconductor nanoparticles (NPs). In the case of the samples with metallic NPs, the enhanced PL was attributed to the increased local field on the rare-earth ions located in the proximity of the NPs and/or the energy transfer from the metallic NPs to the rare-earth ions. For the glasses containing silicon NPs, the PL enhancement was mainly due to the energy transfer from the NPs to the Er3+ ions. The nonlinear (NL) optical properties of PbO-GeO2 films containing gold NPs were also investigated. The experiments in the pico- and subpicosecond regimes revealed enhanced values of the NL refractive indices and large NL absorption coefficients in comparison with the films without gold NPs. The reported experiments demonstrate that germanate and tellurite glasses, having appropriate rare-earth ions doping and NPs concentration, are strong candidates for PL-based devices, all-optical switches, and optical limiting.

Second harmonic generation in germanotellurite bulk glass‐ceramics

“…The cut‐off shows a red‐shift with respect to the pristine glass as a sequence of silver oxide incorporation. The formation of silver clusters observed previously in literature could also be at the origin of the band‐gap reduction. To further investigate the origin of such additional absorption, a photoluminescence (PL) experiment was carried out for the glasses under investigation.…”

Photoluminescence and nonlinear optical phenomena in plasmonic random media—A review of recent works

“…After cooling the samples to room temperature inside the furnace, they were polished, cut, and then submitted to additional heat-treatment (HT) to nucleate silver NPs. Samples without metallic NPs were also fabricated to be used as reference (details on the PGO samples preparation are given in [11]). To investigate the size and shape of the NPs, a transmission electron microscope (TEM) operating at 300 kV was used.…”

“…For instance, large NL susceptibilities of colloids based on silver and gold NPs, excited by lasers operating in the 400-1000 nm range, were demonstrated for different values of f [2,[4][5][6][7][8]. On the other hand many studies were focused on rareearth ions (REI) doped glasses containing metallic NPs [1,3,[9][10][11][12][13]. Among the studied glasses germanates were identified as good host for REI and metallic NPs.…”

Spectroscopic properties of the Pr3+ ion in TeO2-WO3-PbO-La2O3 and TeO2-WO3-PbO-Lu2O3 glasses

“…The tellurite glass systems doped with Pr 3+ ions have been widely studied for their structural details and luminescent properties [3,[11][12][13][14][15]. Moreover, due to the low phonon energies mentioned above, the fluorescence intensity of Pr 3+ -doped tellurite glasses has been observed to be several times larger than that of other glass systems [16][17][18]. The energy level diagram of the Pr 3+ ion contains several metastable states that provide the possibility of simultaneous emissions in the blue, orange, red and infrared regions [19,20].…”