<title>Recent advances in heavy-metal oxide glass research</title>

Abstract

Our laboratory recently has announced the formation of glasses based on the oxides of lead bismuth and gallium. These glasses are unusual in that they contain none of the traditional glass-forming caflons (eg. silicon boron germanium or phosphorous) yet exhibit a remarkable stability. In addition to this stability these compositions exhibit some rather unique properties such as the ability to transmit well into the infrared region (to about 8 microns) and a high nonresonant optical nonlinearity 3 (of 42 xlO 14 esu). To take advantage of this latter property for optical switching applications it is desirable to prepare the glass as an optical waveguide. Silica additions were made to a heavy metal oxide base glass in an effort to derive compositions suitable for core and cladding. The present paper describes the effects of these additions. 1.