New Candidate Multicomponent Chalcogenide Glasses for Supercontinuum Generation

Abstract

Broadband supercontinuum (SC) generation requires host material attributes defined by both optical and physical properties and the material’s manufacturability. We review and define the trade-offs in these attributes as applied to fiber or planar film applications based on homogeneous glass property data, and provide a series of examples of how one might optimize such attributes through material compositional and morphology design. As an example, we highlight the role of varying composition, microstructure, and linear/nonlinear optical properties, such as transmittance, refractive index, and the multiphoton absorption coefficient, for a series of novel multicomponent chalcogenide glasses within a model GeSe2-As2Se3-PbSe (GAP-Se) system. We report key optical property variation as a function of composition and form, and discuss how such glasses, suitable for both fiber and planar film processing, could lend themselves as candidates for use in SC generation. We demonstrate the impact of starting glass composition and morphology and illustrate how tailoring composition and form (bulk versus film) leads to significant variation in linear, nonlinear, and dispersive optical property behavior within this system that enables design options that are attractive to optimization of desirable SC performance, based on optical composites.

Infrared Glass–Ceramics with Multidispersion and Gradient Refractive Index Attributes

“…Due to the nonhomogeneous nature of the parent glasses at high PbSe levels, a further description of the starting glass morphology examined here is warranted, as this morphology will define the postheat‐treated GCs microstructure and as will be shown, the evolution of novel optical properties. As previously reported and noted above, the base glass morphology across the (GeSe 2 –3As 2 Se 3 ) 1− x PbSe x series exhibits liquid–liquid phase separation, and glasses within the midrange of compositions ( x ≈ 10–40 mol% PbSe) are dominated by metastable phase separation (droplet/matrix morphology) with a narrow range of unstable (spinodal decomposition) morphology . This behavior will ultimately influence the probability of successful conversion from glass to a low‐optical‐loss GC, and the magnitude of postheat‐treated physical property change.…”

“…Postheat treatment microstructure was investigated on select compositions in order to determine the type and morphology of crystals that formed and the impact of the precipitated crystals on both the nanocomposite's refractive index and dispersion change and its transmission loss/scattering. Since parent base glasses with 20 and 40 mol% PbSe possess two distinct, inverse starting morphologies, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images were collected from post‐heat‐treated samples of the two compositions along with corresponding XEDS images and selected area electron diffraction (SAED) patterns, to examine the resulting GC's nanoscale microstruture across this composition space. Figure a shows a dark field (DF) TEM image collected from a GC with 20 mol% PbSe where highly asymmetric, bright particles are distributed in a dark matrix.…”

“…While absolute index change is important in consideration of use for GRIN applications, optical designers typically rely on a material's dispersion over the target spectral window of use. Refractive indices for the base GAP‐Se glasses and GC materials were measured at six wavelengths across the IR spectral range at wavelengths of 1.88, 3.3, 4.515, 7.968, 9.294, and 10.717 µm, and measured indices were subsequently fitted with a Sellmeier function and its coefficients of A , B , C , D , and E were determined . These data are shown in Figure a,b.…”

Evidence for a Correlation of Melt Fragility Index With Topological Phases of Multicomponent Glasses

“…Thorpe (Thorpe, 1983) in 1983. Chalcogenides have also emerged as the materials of choice for 3D-X-point memory devices(Intel 1 ; Malventano 2 ; Tang et al, 2009), phase-change memory (Raoux and Wuttig, 2009), Continuum emission in the IR (Goncalves et al, 2018;Tremblay et al, 2018), optical fibers, and waveguides (Tang et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2019). The interplay between these applications and underlying basic science including topological phases (TP) now offers new prospects to tune material functionality with applications.…”

Correlating Melt Dynamics and Configurational Entropy Change With Topological Phases of AsxS100–x Glasses and the Crucial Role of Melt/Glass Homogenization

“…These considerations have a close bearing on their Topological phases (Mantisi et al, 2015;Boolchand and Goodman, 2017). In recent years these materials have found a niche in select advanced applications as phase change memory materials (Raoux, 2009), in 3D X-point memory 1 (Tang et al, 2009;Malventano, 2017), as materials of choice for optical fibers and waveguides in infrared optics and Supercontinuum emission (Goncalves et al, 2018;Tremblay et al, 2018), amongst many others. In these investigations, it would appear that glass functionality is apparently tied to their chemical composition, and more generally to the underlying Topological phases.…”