Rare Earth Doped Glasses for Displays and Light Generation

Abstract

Glasses are very versatile materials, also because of the ease of doping them with various elements and compounds. In particular, rare-earth-doped glasses have greatly contributed to the development of optical amplifiers, lasers, active optical waveguides and white-light-emitting devices. White light emitting diodes (W-LEDs) and color LEDS obtained by the combination of an UV emitting LED, such as AlGaN-based LED, with a glass phosphor exhibit very interesting properties. In the present contribution we report the luminescence characteristics of zinc-sodium-aluminosilicates glasses variously doped, namely either singly doped with Eu3+, Tb3+ or Sm3+, or co-doped with Tb3+-Eu3+, Tb3+-Sm3+ and Tb3+-Ce3+. These glasses have also proved to be suitable for ion exchange and therefore for the production of active optical waveguides.