Thermal shift of whispering gallery modes in tellurite glass microspheres

Abstract

The tremendous progress made in recent years in the production of tellurite glasses has led to the development of different optical elements and devices on their basis such as microresonators and microlasers. The investigation of tellurite glass microresonators is of great importance for many potential applications. We studied theoretically and experimentally the nonlinear thermo-optical effects in tellurite glass microresonators under continuous-wave laser pumping. We calculated the temperature distributions for both, steady-state and transient non-stationary regimes and simulated shifts of the resonant wavelengths of whispering gallery modes. We produced Tm-doped tellurite glass microspheres and measured the resonant wavelength shifts as functions of the heat power. Our experimental results are in a good agreement with the theoretical predictions.

Keywords

• Microsphere
• Tellurite glass
• Whispering gallery modes
• Thermo-optical effect
• Microlaser