Significant suppression of Rayleigh scattering loss in silica glass formed by the compression of its melted phase

chnological interest in manufacturing higher-performance optical fi bers. Recently, silica glass formed at high temperature and pressure is attracting much attention due to its physical properties which cannot be obtained by compression at room temperature. For example, the intermediate-range order structure of silica glass which was hotcompressed at several GPa around the glass-transition temperature (Tg ~1400K) was reported to be more homogeneous and is completely diff erent from that of silica glass compressed at room temperature, even though their densities were similar. Th e threshold pressure to trigger the change seemed to decrease with increasing temperature. We have previously reported that the Rayleigh scattering intensity in silica glass can be explained in terms of the voids in the glass behaving as scattering particles.