Optical properties of porous glasses doped with ZnS

The paper presents a new preparation method to form semiconductor nanoclusters inside silica porous glasses as matrices and describes investigations of the luminescence properties of the samples loaded repeatedly with ZnS nanoparticles. Silica porous glasses were obtained by leaching the two-phase sodium borosilicate glasses in acid solution. The samples consisting of two types of glasses with different pore sizes and immobilized nanosized ZnS in these matrices by a chemical deposition process were used. EDS measurements confirmed purity of the samples. The recorded absorption and photoluminescence spectra exhibit the quantum size effect due to the increasing number of the chemical deposition cycles.