Phosphotellurite glass and glass-ceramics with high TeO2 contents: thermal, structural and optical properties.

Phosphotellurite based glasses have interesting features such as low characteristic temperatures, high glass forming ability, high thermal stability against crystallization and a broad transparency window from ultraviolet (UV) to near-infrared (NIR), which makes them promising materials for photonic applications. In this work, phosphotellurite binary glasses, having a composition (100 - x)TeO2 - xBa(PO3)2 with x varying from 1 to 20 mol%, were synthesized by the conventional melt-quenching method in covered gold crucibles under air. Optical, physical and structural properties of the new glass samples were investigated by differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, linear optical absorption from UV to NIR, IR transmittance, and optical limiting experiments. Transparent glass-ceramics in the visible range were obtained for phosphotellurite samples containing 2, 4 and 6 mol% of Ba(PO3)2 and the phase crystallization was investigated through Rietveld analysis and transmission electron microscopy. The incorporation of Ba(PO3)2 into the TeO2 network drastically increases the thermal stability against devitrification and helps to shift the infrared multiphonon absorption edge to longer wavelengths. Nonlinear measurements performed with a picosecond laser at 532 nm indicate large effective nonlinear absorption coefficients for all samples. In summary, the dependence of the spectroscopic properties on the compositions of the samples revealed promising transparent glass and glass-ceramics for photonic applications.

Screening effect on the exciton mediated nonlinear optical susceptibility of semiconductor quantum dots.

We study the exciton contribution to the third-order optical susceptibility of one-dimensional semiconductor quantum dots and show that the screening of the electron-hole interaction has a strong influence on the nonlinear optical properties in the weak confinement regime. Based on a density matrix formulation, we estimate the spectrum of the third-order optical susceptibility and its contribution to the refraction index and absorption coefficient. In particular, we show that the multipeaked spectrum of the nonlinear susceptibility, which results from the hydrogenoid character of the exciton eigenstates for a purely Coulombian electron-hole coupling, is reverted towards a single peaked structure as the interaction becomes strongly screened, thus leading to a substantial enhancement of the nonlinear optical properties of semiconductor quantum dots.