Rare Earth Doped Glasses for Displays and Light Generation

Glasses are very versatile materials, also because of the ease of doping them with various elements and compounds. In particular, rare-earth-doped glasses have greatly contributed to the development of optical amplifiers, lasers, active optical waveguides and white-light-emitting devices. White light emitting diodes (W-LEDs) and color LEDS obtained by the combination of an UV emitting LED, such as AlGaN-based LED, with a glass phosphor exhibit very interesting properties. In the present contribution we report the luminescence characteristics of zinc-sodiumaluminosilicates glasses variously doped, namely either singly doped with Eu3+, Tb3+ or Sm3+, or co-doped with Tb3+-Eu3+, Tb3+-Sm3+ and Tb3+-Ce3+. These glasses have also proved to be suitable for ion exchange and therefore for the production of active optical waveguides.