Chalcogenide glasses as solid state optical limiters at 1.064 μm

Chalcogenide glasses present high values for third-order non-linear optical properties, i.e., high non-linear refractive indices (800 times as high as the non-linearity of silica glass at 1.064 mum) and a high non-linear absorption coefficient, which can reach more than 5 cm/GW. We study here the optical limiting properties of several chalcogenide glasses at 1.064 mum with a picosecond pulsed Nd:YAG laser and we observed a real optical limiting behavior. In the case of GeAs2Se2, glass for example, the decrease of the transmitted intensity is around 75% compared to the theoretical linear transmission, for incident pulses of 5 GW/cm(2). The comparison between the theoretical non-linear transmission induced by the two photon absorption effect and the experimental non-linear transmittance shows that the optical limiting properties are mainly due to non-linear absorption. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.