Multifarious transparent glass nanocrystal composites

Glasses comprising well known ferroelectric crystalline phases have been a subject of curious investigation from the point of view of exploiting these composites for dielectric, pyroelectric, ferroelectric, electro and non-linear optical devices. Transparent glass-ceramics containing ferroelectric crystallites at nano scale have been of much interest owing to their promising physical properties. The advantages that are associated with glass-ceramics include very low levels of porosity and hence high break down voltages. It is of our interest to nanocrystallize Aurivillius family of ferroelectric oxides and tetragonal tungsten bronzes on borate and tellurite based glass matrices and demonstrate their promising optical and nonlinear optical properties. Apart from the above, the nanocrystallites of well known ferroelectric material LiNbO3 was grown in a reactive glass matrix. These nanocrystals of LiNbO3 exhibited intense second harmonic signals in transmission mode when exposed to IR light at 1064 nm. The most interesting result was the demonstration of optical diffraction of the second harmonic signals which was attributed to the presence of self- organized sub-micrometer sized LiNbO3 crystallites that were indeed inscribed by the IR laser light which was used to probe in the NLO property of these materials