Investigations on europium doped alumino-silicate xerogel incorporated in micro-channel glass and porous silicon

Porous materials in general have received great attention from the last century. The development of new porous materials and the preparation of new composites based on porous materials is a subject of interest. The development of porous silicon based optical composite materials opened up new ways of incorporating optically active sol-gel materials into porous silicon. High purity silica optical fibres allow the most rapid and efficient data transmission. The objective of this work is to develop micro-channel glass / porous silicon – rare earth doped xerogel and glass composites, which would serve as compact optical amplifiers and delay line devices. Micro-channel glass / porous silicon xerogel composites have been prepared by incorporation of sol-gel prepared from tetraethoxysilane, aluminium iso-propoxide and europium chloride into the porous matrix. Both xerogel and glass composites have been studied by various techniques such as FTIR, micro-Raman, photoluminescence spectroscopy, EDX and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM).