Efficient Nd-doped glass-ceramic fiber laser

Summary form only given. It has recently been shown that it is possible to make glass-ceramic single-mode optical fibers without significantly increasing the scattering loss, despite the presence of small (typically <10-nm diameter) crystals embedded within the core of the single-mode optical fiber. Furthermore the strong partitioning of rare-earth ions into the crystalline phase opens up the attractive possibility of combining the spectroscopic properties of rare-earth-doped crystals with the robustness of glass fiber technology. The optical fibers used are made by a double crucible technique from glasses with compositions containing, 30SiO/sub 2/-15AlO/sub 3/2/-29CdF/sub 2/-17PbF/sub 2/-4YF/sub 3/ and were doped with 500-ppm NdF/sub 3/. The fiber core diameter is around 5 micron.