In-Situ Phase Transition Control in the Supercooled State for Robust Active Glass Fiber

Abstract

The construction of a dopant-activated photonic composite is of great technological importance for various applications, including smart lighting, optical amplification, laser, and optical detection. The bonding arrangement around the introduced dopants largely determines the properties, yet it remains a daunting challenge to manipulate the local state of the matrix (i.e., phase) inside the transparent composite in a controllable manner. Here we demonstrate that the relaxation of the supercooled state enables in-situ phase transition control in glass. Benefiting from the unique local atom arrangement manner, the strategy offers the possibility for simultaneously tuning the chemical environment of the incorporated dopant and engineering the dopant-host interaction. This allows us to effectively activate the dopant with high efficiency (calculated as ∼100%) and profoundly enhance the dopant-host energy-exchange interaction. Our results highlight that the in-situ phase transition control in glass may provide new opportunities for fabrication of unusual photonic materials with intense broadband emission at ∼1100 nm and development of the robust optical detection unit with high compactness and broadband photon-harvesting capability (from X-ray to ultraviolet light).

Crystallization control in Ni2+‐doped glass‐ceramics for broadband near‐infrared luminesce

“…On the basis of the crystal field theory, Ni 2+ dopant potentially shows broadband emission in the NIR region. The broadband emission of Ni 2+ ions in oxide and oxyfluoride glass systems has been widely studied, and the broadband NIR luminescence has been experimentally demonstrated . Oxyfluoride glass‐ceramics are attractive because the low phonon energy of oxyfluoride crystals in glass usually leads to the low nonradiative relaxation rate of active ions.…”

Transparent niobate glass‐ceramics for optical limiting

“…In addition, the method provides an alternative way to mitigate the nanostructure loading issue in the construction of optical limiting materials. Furthermore, it is necessary to point out that the proposed strategy should be general to various types of glass materials containing elements with high electronic polarizability (eg, Ti, Te and Ta), pointing to promising opportunities for construction of excellent all‐inorganic nonlinear optical materials.…”

Extended Energy Conservation Law in Alloys: the Absence of Energy Non-Equilibrium

“…Based on the above discussion, it is necessary to clarify that many amorphous materials [33], antimatter [34], and supersaturated [35] and supercooled [36] materials, which are currently defined as non-equilibrium materials, are non-equilibrium materials with respect to only one fixed criterion among various criteria. In principle, according to the major premise of the space-mass energy conservation law, it is reasonable to assume that all the states of the continuum material are energy balance states.…”