Study On The Automatically Optical Limiting Materials In The Field Of Laser Manufacturing

The research of laser protection (optical limiting) materials is becoming the focus of the community when the laser is more and more useful in the production and our lives. The third order optical nonlinearities of the materials was improved evidently through rare earth doping, and so on to improve laser protection performance. Laser Protection glass researched in this paper can protect 532nm laser.The paper summarizes all kinds of laser protection technology, development situations and characteristics of all kinds of laser protection technology and importantly reviewed the works of both at home and abroad using different rare earth, different concentrations of mixing, as well as different matrixes, and so on to improve the third order nonlinearities of the materials.This paper researches the composition of borosilicate glass and manufacture technology. Using an improved borosilicate glass with small third-order optical nonlinearities, i.e., nonlinear refractive index (NLRI) and nonlinear absorption coefficient (NLAC), which was made through high temperature fusing method as the matrix and comparative glass. Fifteen pieces of RE-doped borosilicate glasses doped with a different kind of RE oxide each are prepared, and their third-order optical nonlinearities are measured by the closed-aperture Z-scan technique, open-aperture Z-scan experiment and an optical limiting experiment using nanosecond laser pulses at 532nm wavelength. It is found that three kinds (i.e. Nd, Er and Ho) of RE-doped glasses possess remarkable absorptive structure in the visible region, especially in the vicinity of 532nm from the transmission spectra, so we emphasis on analysing the nonlinear optical properties of this three kinds of RE-doped glasses and contrast with other RE-doped glasses.It is found that every glass possesses a positive third-order NLRI and a positive third-order NLAC, and both the third-order NLRI and NLAC of RE-doped glasses are larger than those of the matrix glass, especially three kinds (i.e. Nd, Er and Ho) of RE doped glasses. Also, an open-aperture Z-scan experiment and an optical limiting experiment further demonstrate that the RE-doped glasses have a high third-order NLAC. All the experimental results show that three kinds (i.e. Nd, Er and Ho) of RE doped glasses have good protection performance for the 532nm-laser and can be used as laser protection materials.