Aqueous Corrosion of the GeSe 4 Chalcogenide Glass: Surface Properties and Corrosion Mechanism

The aqueous corrosion behavior of the GeSe 4 glass composition has been studied over time under various conditions (temperature and pH). The evolution of the surface topography by atomic force microscopy and properties such as surface hardness and reduced modulus, as well as the optical transmission in the 1–16 μm window, have been measured as a function of time spent in the corrosive solution. It was found that even if the glass reacts at room temperature, its optical transparency was barely affected. Nevertheless, the durability of GeSe 4 was found to be drastically affected by an increase of both temperature and pH. Furthermore, pure selenium nanoparticles were formed during the corrosion process, and the nature of these nanoparticles—amorphous or crystallized (hexagonal phase)—depends on temperature. A reaction mechanism was proposed, and the activation energy of the reaction of corrosion in deionized water (47 kJ/mol) was determined from an original technique that relies on the temporal optical loss variation of a GeSe 4 optical fiber placed in water at different temperatures.