Recovery of IR luminescence in photobleached bismuth-doped fibers by thermal annealing

The effect of annealing temperature on the luminescent properties of bismuth-doped fibers bleached by 532 nm laser radiation was investigated. The photoluminescence (PL) measurements were performed in pristine and photobleached samples which were thermally annealed at various temperatures ranging from 100 to 900 °C and slowly cooled. We observed that the intensity of the PL band at 1700 nm in the photobleached fibers recovered its pre-bleached level. Moreover, it was shown that a significant increase of the PL level could be achieved using the special annealing regime. Thereby, we obtained the experimental evidence of a thermally activated recovery process of the PL intensity showing that photoinduced changes of PL in bismuth-doped fibers are completely reversible. The mechanism of the thermal recovery of the PL is discussed. (paper)