Abstract

Optical glasses with large nonresonant non-linearity are good candidate materials for fast all-optical switching devices, and they may also be used to enhance the performance of mode-locked lasers. It is only recently that workers have begun to investigate highly nonlinear glasses.^1-4 For example, there is only one previous investigation of the dispersion of nonlinear refractive indices of glasses. A recent breakthrough has been the demonstration of substantial enhancement of the nonlinearity through the addition of heavy-metal modifiers.⁴

© 1995 Optical Society of America