Glass can be doped with rare earth ions, high refractive index ions and microcrystallites which give it great potential as a photonic medium. The practical advances of these types of glass are expected to have significant roles in multimedia systems in the next generation.

This book is thus an introduction to the theory and recent progress in the technology of glass with special photonic properties, for graduate students, practising engineers and scientists, who wish to supplement their theoretical and practical knowledge of this field with the material science aspects. Hence, this book is intended to be comprehensive enough for an introductory course and be easily readable by practising engineers who are interested in and desire an overview of this field.

Although this book is designed with the purpose of providing a fundamental review of materials with special optical properties, another goal is to provide practical and useful information about developments over the last 10 years in this rapidly changing field. It is impossible, however, to describe all the innovations which have been developed over the last 10 years and omissions are inevitable in a compilation of the size of this book. References to work with respect to the range of glasses examined in this book are given as references to the tables in each chapter. Readers interested in specific data will be able to refer to the original literature. Even so, there remains the possibility of serious omission, for which we beg, in advance, the reader's pardon.