Abstract:We performed a comparative spectroscopic analysis on three novel Tm 3+ :tellurite-based glasses with the following compositions Tm 2 O 3 :TeO 2 -ZnO (TeZnTm), Tm 2 O 3 :TeO 2 -Nb 2 O 5 (TeNbTm), and Tm 3+ :TeO 2 -K 2 O-Nb 2 O 5 (TeNbKTm), primarily for 2-µm laser applications. Tellurite glasses were prepared at different doping concentrations in order to investigate the effect of Tm 3+ ion concentration as well as host composition on the stimulated emission cross sections and the luminescence quantum efficiencies. By performing Judd-Ofelt analysis, we determined the average radiative lifetimes of the 3 H 4 level to be 2.55 ± 0.07 ms, 2.76 ± 0.03 ms and 2.57 ± 0.20 ms for the TeZnTm, TeNbTm and TeNbKTm samples, respectively. We clearly observed the effect of the cross-relaxation, which becomes significant at higher Tm 2 O 3 concentrations, leading to the quenching of 1460-nm emission and enhancement of 1860-nm emission. Furthermore, with increasing Tm 2 O 3 concentrations, we observed a decrease in the fluorescence lifetimes as a result of the onset of non-radiative decay. For the 3 H 4 level, the highest obtained quantum efficiency was 32% for the samples with the lowest Tm 2 O 3 ion concentration. For the 1860-nm emission band, the average emission cross section was determined to measure around 6.33 ± 0.34 × 10 −21 cm 2 , revealing the potential of thulium-doped tellurite gain media for 2-µm laser applications in bulk and fiber configurations.