“…In addition to being a common impurity in these new oxygen ion-conducting materials, LSG has attracted much recent attention as an important optical material; it has potential as a solid state laser (Rybaromanowski et al, 1996;Malinowski et al, 1996;Simondi-Teisseire et al, 1997;Burshtein et al, 1997) and doping with Nd, Pr, Eu, Er and Yb can be used to tune the operation wavelength (Rybaromanowski et al, 1996(Rybaromanowski et al, , 1997Malinowski et al, 1996;Simondi-Teisseire et al, 1997). Refractive index studies indicate that LSG and its derivatives could be used for a number of nonlinear optical applications (Burshtein et al, 1996). The structures of these materials are thus of much importance in understanding the optical properties.…”