Sol gel Photonics: from fabrication to application - Andrea Chiappini (CANCELLED)

The sol-gel processing is a rapidly growing area in the field of materials science owing to the potential to reduce production costs of high-quality thin films and bulk materials obtained at relatively low temperatures.The preparation of high purity stable solutions via wet chemistry allows realizing low loss glass-based planar waveguides activated with rare earth ions and fabricating 3D colloidal crystals with the aim to obtain sensitive and low cost responsive materials.In this lecture we give an overview of different confined structures such as (i) glass-ceramics planar waveguides activated with Er3+ or Tb3+ and Yb3+, (ii) responsive chromatic colloidal crystals and (iii) metallo-dielectric structures, focusing the attention on their fabrication and optical and spectroscopic features and on their possible applications.