In a recent work published in Journal of Materials Chemistry C 8, 2065, 2020 https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/tc/c9tc05910e#!divAbstract we show that a laser material with relatively low thermal conductivity can be grown with laser quality by the Laser Floating Zone growth technique using a CO2 laser as heat source for material melting.
K
ey steps for this achievement have been the selection of the (Lu0.3Gd0.7)2SiO5 composition to obtain single phase material upon resolidification and the engineering of the heating/cooling cycles.
The lack of any crucible to hold the material allows the melting of refractory compounds above 1500 ºC in oxidizing atmospheres. This suposses a great advantage for the devellopment of crystals for mode-locked laser producing ultrashort laser pulses.
This has been possible through the collaboration with the Aveiro University.
