Use of nanoporous glass for the fabrication of heavily bismuth-doped active optical fibres

We report on the fabrication of bismuth-doped active optical fibres using porous glass as a fibre core material. The fabrication of bismuth-doped porous-glass-based fibres is a technologically complex process that includes several high-temperature processing steps. Carefully adjusting conditions of all process steps, we have produced the first optical fibres with a rather high bismuth concentration (up to 0.5 at % and above) and necessary luminescence characteristics. Luminescence spectra of the materials produced in this study are presented.