Encyclopedia of Spectroscopy and Spectrometry || Optical Spectroscopy of Rare-Earth Ions in the Solid State

摘要： The birth of optical spectroscopy as science can be considered from the time when in 1672 Isaac Newton published his famous paper describing the results of experiments where, using a glass prism, he decomposed a beam of sunlight into its optical spectral components ranging from blue to red. Since that time, scientists and engineers studied a broad range of phenomena associated with the interaction of light with matter, using the fact that light actually contains different spectral components. Within a field of optical spectroscopy, it is hard to underestimate the importance of optical spectroscopy of different optical centers in solid-state materials because of numerous scientific and industrial applications of such optical systems. These applications range from studying fundamental properties of impurity centers in solids, solid-state material properties, up-conversion devices, scintillators, and Faraday rotators to a creation of solid-state lasers.