Visible to vacuum-UV range optical absorption of oxygen dangling bonds in amorphous SiO2

Abstract

Synthetic silica glass with an optical absorption spectrum dominated by oxygen dangling bonds (nonbridging oxygen hole centers, or NBOHCs) and having negligible (1%) contribution from the usually copresent Si dangling bonds (E\ensuremath{'}-centers), was prepared by room temperature ultraviolet photobleaching of high SiOH content (``wet'') silica, irradiated by F${}_{2}$ laser (7.9 eV) at $T$ = 80 K. This allowed us to obtain the up-to-now controversial optical absorption spectrum of NBOHC in the ultraviolet and vacuum-ultraviolet (UV-VUV) region of the spectrum and to show that it is semicontinuous from 4 to 7.8 eV and cannot be represented by a pair of distinct Gaussian bands. Since NBOHC is one of the main UV-VUV range optical absorbers in silica, its spectral shape provides a tool to disentangle contributions of different color centers to optical losses in this spectral region.