Phosphate glasses and optical fibres for bio-photonic application

The recent growing interest in the field of bio-photonics requires a great effort towards the development of new materials able to guarantee suitable biocompatibility and/or bioresorbability, while showing appropriate optical properties. This is fundamental to prototype innovative sensing devices for biomedical applications. Often, materials with suitable optical properties do not present the necessary compatibility with human body, and viceversa. Glassy materials and phosphate glasses in particular, are promising candidates to satisfy both these requirements, thanks to their intrinsic biodegrading properties and the possibility to activate them both optically and biologically through ion exchange process for instance. The aim of this work is to formulate phosphate glasses with excellent optical properties, which also behave as biocompatible and, if needed, bioactive materials. They proved to be stable, easy to process, and suitable for fibre drawing. Novel customized glass compositions were designed, fabricated and characterized by thermal analysis and optical spectroscopy. Custom configurations, including capillaries, were fabricated using an in- house developed fibre drawing tower. The optical properties and performance of the so-obtained devices are also reported and discussed.