Microstructural and spectroscopic study of sol–gel derived Nd-doped silica glasses

Nd3+ photoluminescence study of Nd-doped Si-rich silica films obtained by reactive magnetron sputtering

“…A lifetime of 47 ms can be deduced, which slightly increases with the annealing temperature (not shown). Those values are lower than the ones observed in silica matrix [10,12], as expected, but are comparable to the values reported in Nd 3+ doped silicon rich silicon oxide host [6]. Thus, such result confirms that the surrounding of the Nd 3+ ions in our samples is similar to those of the Shin's group.…”

“…5. The decay exhibits a well known non-exponential behaviour observed in silicabased glasses [10]. The contribution of Si-nc to the 900 nm emission can be neglected since an annealing temperature of 1100 1C is needed to optically activate them.…”

Cosolvent-free sol–gel synthesis of rare-earth and aluminum codoped monolithic silica glasses

“…The¸e xp value of the Al-codoped glass is much larger than that of the Al-free glass because of the enhanced dispersion of Nd 3+ ions, resulting in a relatively large¯value (³0.30.4). However, thȩ exp value is not large enough, as compared with PL decay constants reported for NdAl codoped glasses (280450, 3), 4) 257425, 7) 250550, 12) 325, 14) 240250, 17) and 376¯s 27) ). It is partly because of the small z Al /z Nd value (z Al /z Nd = 1).…”

“…3), and similar results have also been reported in several Nd-doped silica glasses. 6), 14) However, the diffraction peak shown in Fig. 3 is weak and relatively broad, suggesting that the average size of the crystallites is too small to account for the light scattering.…”

“…Figure 3 shows XRD patterns of the crushed Al-free and Al-codoped glasses. A weak and broad diffraction, probably attributed to Nd 2 O 3 crystallites, 14) was observed at 2ª ¼ $ 30.5°in the Al-free glass, whereas the formation of crystalline phases was not obvious in the Al-codoped glass. ¢ ], where¸is the PL decay constant and ¢ (0 < ¢¯1) is the stretched exponent, yielded¸¼ $ 252¯s and ¢ ¼ $ 0.83 for the Al-codoped glass, anḑ ¼ $ 18¯s and ¢ ¼ $ 0.68 for the Al-free glass.…”