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International audience; The present study relates to a new method for the synthesis of As2Se3 glass in a controlled atmosphere. The advantage of this technique is that it does not require sealing of the silica reaction container and therefore makes it likely to substitute the current industrial batch by batch synthesis which actually needs very expensive single-use sealed silica vessels. An experimental device has been developed for these purposes. It is equipped with a stirring mechanism to homogenize the molten bath. In order to avoid contamination by oxygen and moisture, the synthesis is carried out under argon flow (pressure of 1 bar). Material losses during synthesis can be reduced to less than 2% when temperature is progressively increased up to 430 °C. Bulk glass ingots are finally obtained according to a two-step annealing process. Their chemical composition is analyzed by EDS and shows a variation range of less than 0.2%. The excellent reproducibility of the given method is also confirmed by the refractive indexes, that do not differ for more than 1 * 10−3 from one another. Adverse absorption bands due to oxygen do not occur in the 8-12 μm spectral region when 1000 ppm of Mg is added. As no distilling operation has been carried out until now, the magnesium oxide partially keeps staying in the glass and leads to scattering losses at short wavelengths.

Synchrotron radiation photoelectron spectra taken at 100 eV photon energy have been measured to characterize the interface reactions of the metal-insulator-semiconductor systems Cu/RbF/GaAs(100) and Cu/RbF/Ge(100). In comparision, similar sequences are studied on the Cu/GaAs(100) and Cu/Ge(100) interfaces without the RbF interlayer. After Cu-deposition of 1–4 A on RbF-covered (10–14 A) GaAs and Ge surfaces, shoulder peaks appear on both the Ga 3d and Ge 3d core levels. The shoulder peaks are shifted 1.1 and 1.4 eV to higher binding energy for the Ga 3d and Ge 3d levels, respectively. The Rb4p and F2p peak positions are slightly shifted between 0.25 and 0.5 eV. The broad second Ga 3d and Ge 3d peaks can be correlated to plasmon loss of electrons from these levels in a two-dimensional Rb metal-like layer formed at the Cu/RbF interface. The excitation energy of a Rb surface plasmon in a CuRbRbF system is calculated to be 1.3 eV.