Sol-gel preparation and optical properties of semiconductor doped silica glasses

Semiconductor (Zn/sub x/Cd/sub 1-x/S) doped silica glasses were prepared by sol-gel process and in-situ growth technique. The structure of the materials was characterized by X-ray diffraction technique, the particles size of semiconductor crystallites from X-ray patterns were estimated less than 10 nm. From absorption spectra, we obtained that the absorption edges shifted to short wavelength direction when Zn contents increased, and the absorption edge can be adjusted from 2.46 eV to 2.96 eV by controlling Zn contents. The third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility was studied at 532 nm with 8 ns pulse laser by degenerate four wave mixing (DFWM) technique.