Origin of structural relaxation dependent spectroscopic features of bismuth-activated glasses.

For the first time, we studied the effect of structural relaxation on the NIR spectroscopic properties of bismuth-activated germanium glasses below glass transition temperature. Interestingly, distinct change behavior of NIR luminescence is observed at two different heat-treatment temperature ranges corresponding to two different relaxation behavior of glass structure. Besides, when structural modified by partly substituting B(2)O(3) for GeO(2), a narrower and more thermal sensitive luminescence is observed, which is inexplicable by "inhomogeneous broadening" and we tentatively attribute it to a defect-involved reason. Fundamentally the results here not only provide us a deeper insight into the optical property of bismuth-activated materials but also increase our understanding of the glassy state, and practically it delivers some valuable guidance in designing bismuth-activated glasses with superior NIR optical properties.