Nanoscale chemistry and processing of multifunctional composites for nanophotonics and biophotonics

Multifunctional nanostructured materials and composites are of considerable interest for photonics optoelectronics and biophotonics. This paper will f ocus on three topics. In the first part of the paper, we will focus on sili ca encapsulated multifunctional nanoparticles. These particles show enhance d optical properties as well as photo, chemical and thermal stability. In t he second part of the paper we investigate the Er3+ sol-gel multicomponent silica glass prepared with nanostructure control for 1.55 mum amplification . These glasses demonstrate the longest reported lifetime in sol-gel glasse s to date, which we attribute to the reduction of the hydroxyl content in t he glass. The third part of the paper discusses our work on photonic crysta ls.