Topological engineering of doped photonic glasses

The development of doped photonic glass is of fundamental importance for various applications, including telecommunication, lasers, and photovoltaics. Despite the great advances in doping techniques, a long-standing barrier remains concerning how to gain better control over the properties of active dopants in disordered systems. Here, we provide a brief overview of recent progress on the engineering of the chemical environment and chemical state of dopants in glass by tuning the topological features, including sublattices and packing manner of the network. The methods allow us to finely tune the chemical state of active dopants over a wide range of length scales, from dispersed ions to aggregated clusters to nanoparticles, and also offer new opportunities to engineer the local crystal field around active dopants. This inherent structure-based strategy leads to intriguing optical phenomena such as tunable luminescence and notable enhancements in radiative transition probability.