Modern optical technology calls for new glasses with special properties for optical and optoelectronic devices. This text, based on modern quantum optical theories, aims to relate optical and spectroscopic properties to the composition and structure of glass-forming materials.

Aimed at researchers and graduate students, this book provides up-to-date information about the electronic interactions that impact the optical properties of rare earth ions in solids. Its goal is to establish a connection between fundamental principles and the materials properties of rare-earth activated luminescent and laser optical materials. The theoretical survey and introduction to spectroscopic properties covers electronic energy level structure, intensities of optical transitions, ion-phonon interactions, line broadening, and energy transfer and up-conversion. An important aspect of the book lies in its deep and detailed discussions of materials properties and the potential of new applications such as optical storage, information processing, nanophotonics, and molecular probes that have been identified in recent experimental studies. This volume will be a valuable reference book on advanced topics of rare earth spectroscopy and materials science.

During the last fifteen years the field of the investigation of glasses has experienced a period of extremely rapid growth, both in the development of new theoretical ap proaches and in the application of new experimental techniques. After these years of intensive experimental and theoretical work our understanding of the structure of glasses and their intrinsic properties has greatly improved. In glasses we are con fronted with the full complexity of a disordered medium. The glassy state is characterised not only by the absence of any long-range order; in addition, a glass is in a non-equilibrium state and relaxation processes occur on widely different time scales even at low temperatures. Therefore it is not surprising that these complex and novel physical properties have provided a strong stimulus for work on glasses and amorphous systems. The strikingly different properties of glasses and of crystalline solids, e. g. the low temperature behaviour of the heat capacity and the thermal conductivity, are based on characteristic degrees of freedom described by the so-called two-level systems. The random potential of an amorphous solid can be represented by an ensemble of asymmetric double minimum potentials. This ensemble gives rise to a new class of low-lying excitations unique to glasses. These low-energy modes arise from tunneling through a potential barrier of an atom or molecule between the two minima of a double-well.

From the reviews: "The book should be acquired by all libraries with an interest in glass science and applications...the title will endure for many years as the standard work on the properties of optical glass." Optical Systems Engineering

"This book is a very useful reference for understanding chemical bonds among network formers, modifiers, ligands, and dopants, and the spectroscopic properties of dopants in glass hosts Everyone interested in doped glasses should have this book in their library" Optics & Photonics News, Jan 2002

This book is devoted to the problem of the frequency dispersion of optical constants of inorganic glasses. It is the only source providing a comprehensive discussion of this topic on a unified physical and analytical basis. Optical Constants of Inorganic Glasses presents thorough descriptions of the underlying physical phenomena, analytical models for the optical constants dispersion, and detailed information on the optical constants and related optical characteristics of glasses. The broad scope of the book includes such topics as general relationships for the response of a solid to the effect of an electromagnetic field, and specific features of optical spectrum formation for a glass and the resulting constants. The text details methods for reconstructing the spectra of optical constants from raw experimental spectra of glasses, and provides data on the spectra of optical constants in the IR and VUV ranges and on the IR band parameters for inorganic glasses. It includes factors responsible for the behavior of the refractive index dispersion of glasses in the transparency range. The reference fully details the opportunities provided by the recent version of dispersion analysis for glasses based on the specific analytical model for the complex dielectric constant. Until now, this information was only available in Russian journals. A large quantity of never-before-published data on numerical values of optical constants in the medium and far IR and of IR band frequencies and intensities is given for a wide variety of inorganic glasses. For vitreous silica, data on the optical constants are also given for the broad wavelength range in the VUV. Optical Constants of Inorganic Glasses provides the only comprehensive review of available dispersion formulas and methods for interpolating and extrapolating the refractive indices of glasses in the transparency range. The volume is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners in the fields of glass technology