Physico-Chemical Mechanism And Model For Silica Fluorination By Plasma Chemical Methods

Silica glass doping is widely used in fibre optic technology. Fluorine, decreasing the silica refractive index is one of the widespread dodpants. Fluorine-doped silica is, therefore, a material for cladding optical fibres. Fluorine is introduced into silica during glass synthesis by different techniques, the most flexible and promising one being reduced-presure plasmachemical deposition. Despite the widespread practical implementations of silica fluorination, the mechanism of fluorine incorporation into the glass network is so far poorly understood. This paper reports on a model for silica fluorination for the case of reduced-pressure plasma chemical deposition.