Optical Fiber Lasers, Sensors, and Radiation-Shielding Glasses
This community develops two distinct but related material systems: high-performance optical fibers for laser generation and distributed sensing, and doped glass compositions engineered to attenuate gamma and neutron radiation.
The recurring technical focus is on the structural and optical properties of borate, phosphate, and tellurite glass systems, often doped with heavy metals or rare-earth ions to enhance radiation shielding or photoluminescence. In parallel, the community investigates fiber Bragg gratings, erbium- and thulium-doped fiber amplifiers, and femtosecond laser processing for applications in structural health monitoring, temperature sensing, and high-power laser delivery. The work bridges the gap between fundamental glass-ceramic physics and applied engineering solutions for nuclear safety and infrastructure monitoring.
The community is most heavily concentrated in research tracked for Erbium, where it constitutes 31.2% of all Erbium-related papers, and 5,832 papers in this group. It also represents a significant share of research for Thulium (19.5%) and Ytterbium (18.4%).
The community comprises 62,752 papers, primarily published in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids, Optics Letters, and SPIE Proceedings.
Recent work continues to focus on the structural characterization of borosilicate and boro-tellurite glasses for dual-function neutron and gamma shielding, alongside advancements in distributed acoustic sensing and high-efficiency laser delivery through hollow-core fibers.