Abstract
Erbium doped bismuth borosilicate (BBS) glasses, possessing the broadest 1.55 μm near infrared (NIR) emission band among oxide glasses, stand out as excellent fiber material for optical fiber amplifiers. In this work, we demonstrate that both broadened and enhanced NIR emission of Er3+ can be obtained by sensibly combining the effects such as mixed glass former effect, phonon-assisted energy transfer (PAET) and de-excitation effect induced by codopant. Specially, by codoping CeO2 in a controlled manner, it leads to not only much improved optical quality of the glasses, enhanced NIR emission, but also significantly suppressed energy transfer up-conversion (ETU) luminescence which is detrimental to the NIR emission. Cerium incorporated in the glasses exists overwhelmingly as the trivalent oxidation state Ce3+ and its effects on the luminescence properties of Er3+ are discussed. Judd-Ofelt analysis is used to evaluate gain amplification of the glasses. The result indicates that Ce3+/Yb3+/Er3+ triply doped BBS glasses are promising candidate for erbium doped fiber amplifiers. The strategy described here can be readily extended to other rare-earth ions (REs) to improve the performance of REs doped fiber lasers and amplifiers.
Highlights
Another way to increase the population of the lasing level 4I13/2 is by addition of a suitable codopant, such as Ce3+, Eu3+ or Tb3+, to accelerate the non-radiative decay 4I11/2 → 4I13/2 via phonon-assisted energy transfer (PAET)
Our results demonstrate that by resorting to the mixed glass former effect a very broad NIR emission can be obtained in the designed glasses, and when CeO2 was doped in a controlled manner both enhanced NIR and dramatically weakened energy transfer up-conversion (ETU) emissions can be observed
Glasses cannot be prepared at low melting temperature (MT) and with high CeO2 content (d) due to severe crystallization resulted from the undissolved CeO2
Summary
Another way to increase the population of the lasing level 4I13/2 is by addition of a suitable codopant, such as Ce3+, Eu3+ or Tb3+, to accelerate the non-radiative decay 4I11/2 → 4I13/2 via phonon-assisted energy transfer (PAET). Cerium oxide (CeO2) was added into the system, serving as an oxidant to against darkening/crystallization of BBS glasses which limits to a great extent the optical applications of these glasses[20], and as the ion source for Ce3+. The latter point deserves some comments, as is known that cerium incorporated into the glass network is possibly present in two oxidation states, Ce3+ and Ce4+, and their ionic equilibrium depends on the condition of glass formation and the type of glass system involved[21]. Based on Judd-Ofelt (JO) analysis, it is concluded that the lasing properties of the glasses can be improved upon the codoping of CeO2
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