Impact of Y2O3 on the structural, linear and nonlinear optical parameters of Na2O-Fe2O3-B2O3 glass

In this work, we investigated the effect of Y2O3 additives on the microstructure and some optical features of Fe2O3 and Na2O-containing borate glasses. FTIR spectra were studied to explore the microstructure and functional units such as BO3, BO4 and nonbridging oxygen (NBO) content. The areas related to BO3 and BO4 bands were calculated from the deconvolution results. Moreover, the BO4/(BO4 +BO3) ratio, called the N4 parameter, was employed to study the microstructure changes induced by Y2O3/Na2O substitution. Moreover, we found the N4 parameter decreased with rising Y2O3 from 0 to 5 mol.%. In contrast, the area and height of the NBO-related band increased with the rise in Y2O3 from 0 to 5 mol.%. The latter two results reflect decreasing the BO4 content but increasing NBO contents in our glasses with more Y2O3 additives. This reduction in BO4 can be attributed to the higher field strength of Y3+ than the field strength of Na1+. Furthermore, the metallization criterion (MC) showed a very slight decrease from 0.403 to 0.401 with additional additives of Y2O3. Based on the obtained values of MC, the current Y2O3 containing glass samples present high nonlinear features. Further, nonlinear optical parameters showed increasing trends with increasing Y2O3 content.