RESUMO
In sulfur-based chalcogenide glass, i.e., a covalent amorphous solid, the addition of a small amount of Ga + CsBr switches the nearest neighbors of the Dy3+ dopant from S to Br, which results in significant enhancement in the lifetime of the excited 4f configurational states of Dy3+. The chemical preference between [GaS3Br]- and Dy3+ alters only the local structures of the involved rare earth ion. This atomic restructuring occurs spontaneously at a nanoscale during the melt-quenching process, without the need for further heat treatment, and thus improves the luminescence properties of the activator while keeping the thermal and mechanical properties of the parent host material unchanged. In this study, it is experimentally verified that externally applied DC electric fields can further tune the oscillator strengths of Dy3+ in Ge-S glass that contains Ga + CsBr. This experimental finding proves that mass transports driven by electric fields influence the optical properties of rare earth doped in the chalcogenide glass that is compositionally engineered in this study.
