Study of thermal stability and luminescence quenching properties of bismuth-doped silicate glasses for fiber laser applications

In the present work, we report on the luminescence properties of bismuth-doped silicate preforms and fibers under the influence of high temperature annealing and hydrogen-loading then annealing processes. Bismuth-related luminescence is found to be very sensitive to thermal annealing processes and can even totally disappear for specific annealing processes. The observed quenching of the luminescence was attributed to the reduction of part of bismuth ions responsible for the infrared luminescence into a lower valence state of bismuth. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.