Abstract

Sol-gel and Erbium-doped sol-gel glasses are fabricated through polymeric sol-gel technique. This work mainly demonstrates an effective strategy to improve the radiation resistance through glass fictive temperature reduction. The mechanisms are experimentally through UV-Vis-IR spectroscopic techniques. γ-irradiation leads to decrease of the frequency of Si-O-Si band that is likely due to an increase of the fictive temperature associated to an average reduction of bonding angle. Furthermore, we found that that γ-radiation “hardness” is higher in Er³⁺ doped sol-gel silica than that of standard synthetic or natural silica glasses.

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