Overview

The nonlinear optical effects of glass have recently become a focus of increasing scientific and technological interest. All glassy materials possess third-order optical nonlinearity, which is remained a subject of considerable theoretical and experimental efforts stimulated by the need of materials understanding in applications. In the past ten years of development of high power solid state laser devices the self-focusing and laser induced damage were the serious obstacles for application of laser glasses, a great progress has been achieved in development of new laser glasses with low figures of third-order optical nonlinear susceptibility. The optical wavefront distortion in optical glass fibers should be prevented for long haul optical fiber communication, some new approaches to diminish or compensate the nonlinear optical effects in glasses fibers have been explored. Recently on the contrary the strong third-order nonlinear optical effects in glasses have come into a hot spot of many researchers because of their potential applications in photonic devices, such as switching, modulation, optical signal processing etc. It is worth to understand deeply the mechanism and glass composition relationship of the third-order optical nonlinearity of glasses.

In the previous monograph we have introduced the third-order nonlinear optical effects, such as laser induced self-focusing and damage, and optical blooming etc. in glasses, much concerning on dielectric bulk glasses. ^[1] Therefore, we put more emphases in this chapter on the third-order optical nonlinearity of dielectric glass, thin films, semiconductor and metallic particles doped composite glasses, and organic and inorganic hybrid glasses.