Quantitative prediction of the structure and luminescence properties of Nd3+ doped borate laser glasses

Although great advance has been made in glass science, predicting luminescence properties of laser glass poses a significant challenge for scientists due to the complex relationship between the composition, structure, and properties of the rare earth ions doped laser glasses. The development of high-performance laser glass usually relies on intuition and trial-and-error. Recently, with the proposal of the materials genome engineering, the "glass genome" has also attracted much attention. Here, the structure of the Nd3+ doped B2O3-Li2O laser glasses was analyzed using Fourier transform infrared spectra and nuclear magnetic resonance, revealing that the glass contains similar glass-forming ion-centered coordination polyhedron structure groups to the neighbor congruent glassy compounds. The structure and properties of glass largely depend on the neighbor congruent glassy compounds. Therefore, the structure and luminescence properties of Nd3+ doped B2O3-Li2O and B2O3-MgO-Li2O laser glasses can be quantitatively predicted via the neighbor congruent glassy compounds. The predictive values are in good agreement with the experimental data, which indicates that our approach is an effective way to predict the structure and luminescence properties of Nd3+ doped borate laser glasses.