Morphology control and resulting optical functions of transparent glass-ceramics with highly oriented bulk crystals

Abstract

Compositional region for transparent bulk crystallization in BaO-TiO2-SiO2 glass system has been investigated in order to obtain transparent glass-ceramics with optical quality and optical nonlinearity originated in c-axis oriented fresnoite crystals. The target composition region was found to be narrow around the particular ratio of nonstoichiometric 30BaO-20TiO2-50SiO2, and the heat treatment conditions were optimized for the preparation of the glass-ceramic bulk with larger dimension. The nonlinear optical function was successfully confirmed by using double-layer samples of ~7 mm in thickness.