Specialty Optical Fibers Handbook

13.2.1 Fluoride Glass Fibers

Poulain et al. [10, 11] discovered the HMFGs based on zirconium fluoride, also

called fluorozirconate glasses, accidentally in 1975 at the University of Rennes.

In general, the typical fluoride glass has a glass-transition temperature, T

g

, four

times less than silica, is considerably less stable, and has practical failure strains of

only a few percent compared to silica’s greater than 5%. While an enormous

number of multicomponent fluoride glass compositions have been fabricated,

comparably few have been drawn into fiber. This is because the temperature

range for fiber drawing is normally too small in most HMFGs to permit ...