Aerosol techniques for glass formation

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In silica-based optical fibers with special doping for fiber lasers, high purity rare earth oxide glasses must be incorporated into the central core of the optical fiber preform. The rare earth elements used in fiber lasers have very low vapor pressures as inorganic, and even organo-metallic compounds and cannot be convectively transported with ease. To incorporate these elements into the core in a fiber preform, solution doping and sol-gel techniques are presently being employed; however, with these methods it can be difficult to structure the radial profile of the refractive index. By forming an aerosol of organo-metallic compounds, this aerosol may be easily transported into the reaction zone where the compounds dissociate and are oxidized at atmospheric pressure to form a high purity glass. Each liquid aerosol particle (typically of the order of several micrometers) contains all of the elements needed to form a multicomponent glass. This is, in essence, a new technique for glass formation.