Linear and third-order nonlinear optical properties of chalcogenide glasses within a GeS₂-Sb₂S₃-CsCl pseudo-ternary system

In this work, we characterized the optical transmittance, optical band gap, nonlinear refraction and nonlinear absorption of a series of GeS₂-Sb₂S₃-CsCl chalcogenide glasses, and monitored their compositional dependencies. We found that the number of lone-pair electrons and the bandgap energy are two dominate factors that determined these linear and third-order nonlinear optical properties. Besides, evaluation of figure of merit verified that the GeS₂-Sb₂S₃-CsCl glasses are suitable for optical limiting devices.