Laser glass is essentially Nd-doped phosphate glass. It is used as the gain medium in high power lasers. The questions are: (1) Why phosphate glasses are important? (2) Can they be replaced by silicate glasses? (3) How much local variation in structure/composition is tolerated for uniformity in optical properties?
1,2. Phosphate glasses have more narrow spectral amplification contour than the silicate ones so much more efficient for laser generation
3. So far as scattering on the variation essentially increase passive losses of radiation
The same cause that help to narrow spectral amplification contour is a cause of non-stability phosphate glasses at high energy density.
Thank you, Professor Gourari, for clarifications. Do you mean gain-bandwidth as function of frequency? Also, do you know of structure/composition studies on these glasses? That will be of great help.
Its on optical frequencies in area 1.06 mkm. For silica glasses halfbandwidth about 30 nm because of heterogeneous spectral broadening , for phosphate ones about 1 nm. The phosphates have loose structure, therefore they have small Stark effect. In USSR these works were conducted in the laboratory of M.E. Jabotinsky at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 60s.
Has there been any systematic work on the relationship between local structure in the doped glasses, like local crystallization, and the optical properties?@Mark L. Gurari
All I know, that in Laboratory M.E. Jabotinski (may be Zhabotinsky) it was a group, which was engaged by quantomechanical calculations of Nd3+ ions in different environments inorganic and organic. It was 60s. So I think you can find some trends in the Soviet science literature.
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