5. Conclusion

With unrivalled properties in terms of ease of shaping (fibers, planar guides, solid guides) and a vast choice of chemical formulations, glass is an essential material in high-tech optical applications: lasers, sensors, telecommunications, etc. Long-term scientific and technological developments are expected to focus on the transparency of glass in the infrared range, with the development of new stable glass compositions, or glass-ceramics transparent beyond 20 µm, as well as the demonstration of lasing at new wavelengths in rare-earth ion-doped fibers, particularly beyond 4 µm. Generally speaking, the search for ever more powerful laser fibers, at all wavelengths, is a vast field of investigation. Already very convincing results in the generation of supercontinuum by optical fibers give us hope for the arrival of compact light sources with a wide spectral bandwidth.

...