Tellurite and phospho-tellurite glasses: candidate materials for fiber Raman amplifiers

Abstract

The necessity of materials innovation in the field of Raman amplification is reviewed. A new family of tellurite and phospho-tellurite glasses containing heavy metal oxides suitable for ultra-broadband Raman amplification was designed and fabricated. These glasses show enhanced properties than the silica based glasses studied so far for the Raman amplifier application. In addition to the bandwidth, the gain characteristics of these glasses were proved to be much higher than those of the silica based materials. The various structural units which contribute to the overall Raman band were unravelled. Accordingly Raman band engineering was used to tailormake glass compositions with wide continuous Raman bands. This chapter also details the enhanced thermal properties of these glasses suitable for fiber fabrication and the third order nonlinear optical properties which are essential for optical switching and other nonlinear optical effects