Impact of ZnO Addition on Er3+ Near-Infrared Emission, the Formation of Ag Nanoparticles, and the Crystallization of Sodium Fluorophosphate Glass.

Nadia G Boetti,Laeticia Petit,Luukas Kuusela,Alexander Veber

doi:10.3390/ma13030527

Nadia G Boetti, Laeticia Petit + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ma13030527

Copy DOI

Abstract

The impact of the progressive addition of ZnO up to 5 mol% on the thermal, structural, and optical properties of Er3+-doped phosphate glasses within the system NaPO3-NaF-ZnO-Ag2O is discussed. The glass network was found to depolymerize upon the addition of ZnO. This promotes a slight increase in the intensity of the emission at 1.5 µm as well as enhances the silver ions clustering ability under the heat treating. The Ag-nanoparticles formed after moderate heat-treatment can further enhance the emission at 1.5 µm, whereas an excessive amount of the clusters leads to the opposite effect. The addition of ZnO helps to slightly increase the glass ability of the system. The crystallization behavior study revealed that surface crystallization is observed for all the glasses. It is found that even a small ZnO addition changes the crystalline phases formed after devitrification. Moreover, the addition of ZnO decreases the crystallization tendency of the glass.

Highlights

The addition of rare-earth elements (REE) into glasses with various compositions has been intensively studied, as these active glasses can find applications in telecommunications, light detection and ranging, solar panels, and bio-imaging, just to cite a few [1,2,3,4]
Er3+ -doped phosphate glasses are promising for amplifiers, wavelength division multiplexing, and optical communication systems operating at 1.5 μm [7,8,9]
The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the glass composition on various glass properties, especially the spectroscopic properties, on the formation of Ag nanoparticles to enhance the emission centered at 1.5 μm and on the glass crystallization tendency in order to prepare new glass-ceramics

Summary

Introduction

The addition of rare-earth elements (REE) into glasses with various compositions has been intensively studied, as these active glasses can find applications in telecommunications, light detection and ranging, solar panels, and bio-imaging, just to cite a few [1,2,3,4]. Different methods can be used to grow the metallic NPs such as sol–gel [11], direct metal-ion implantation [12], light-ion irradiation in ion-exchanged glasses [13], and annealing in hydrogen atmosphere of ion-exchanged glasses [14], just to cite a few. Most of these methods consist of two-steps: (i) the inclusion of metal ions into the glass matrix and (ii) the formation of clusters upon a post-treatment. Due to its simplicity and low cost, the thermal heat treatment method has been intensively used to form metal

Objectives

Methods

Results