Elimination of porosity in heavily rare-earth doped sol–gel derived silicate glass films

The combination of spin-coating and rapid thermal annealing is a very important sol–gel technique to prepare high quality silicate glass films, widely used in the fabrication of waveguides, photonic bandgap structures and other film-based optical devices. This work found that high rare-earth concentrations will seriously affect the optical quality of the films prepared by the spin-coating/rapid thermal annealing process, with pores with hundreds of nanometres in size being found in heavily rare-earth doped aluminosilicate glass films, causing significant light scattering. However, it was also found that a new recipe using acetylacetone was able to dramatically eliminate these pores and to improve the film optical quality, even for rare-earth concentrations as high as 15 mol%. This result will be useful for the fabrication of sol–gel derived devices based on rare-earth doped silicate glass films like active waveguides, functional films and photonic bandgap structures.