Furnace-melt, multi-component glasses are used to produce dense gain media for waveguide and micro-chip lasers. The compositional flexibility is often accompanied by elevated water contents, which can lead to hydroxyl (OH) quenching. OH quenching can significantly shorten excited state lifetimes, even at low pump powers. It therefore becomes important to know and control the OH content of laser glasses. While a simple relation between infrared vibration spectra and OH contents exists for vitreous silica, we show that this relation does not apply to multicomponent glasses. Instead, we present a self-consistent calculation to determine an order- of-magnitude estimate of the number of quenched rare-earth (RE) ions in multi-component glasses. Infra-red absorption spectra and fluorescence lifetimes are required. This method gives an accurate prediction of quench-shortened fluorescent lifetimes in a wide variety of host glasses.
The use of bound and leaky eigenmodes to describe propagation in radiatively leaky planar waveguides that incorporate material absorption or gain is discussed. A criterion for determining which of the bound and leaky modes should be included in this calculation is provided, as is an explicit means of determining the contribution of each modes. The strategy provided here reveals that for the case of absorptive devices, e.g., waveguide detector structures or absorptive filters, there exists a regime in which one must discard the contribution of a fundamental mode, in favor of an improper leaky mode if one wishes to accurately obtain results such as quantum efficiency and device throughput.
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