Arsenic triselenide is an

inorganic In chemistry, an inorganic compound is typically a chemical compound that lacks carbon–hydrogen bonds, that is, a compound that is not an organic compound. The study of inorganic compounds is a subfield of chemistry known as ''inorganic chemist ...

chemical compound A chemical compound is a chemical substance composed of many identical molecules (or molecular entities) containing atoms from more than one chemical element held together by chemical bonds. A molecule consisting of atoms of only one element ...

with the chemical formula . Amorphous arsenic triselenide is used as a

chalcogenide glass Chalcogenide glass (pronounced hard ''ch'' as in ''chemistry'') is a glass containing one or more chalcogens (sulfur, selenium and tellurium, but excluding oxygen). Such glasses are covalently bonded materials and may be classified as covalent netw ...

for

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultrav ...

. When purified, it transmits light with

wavelength In physics, the wavelength is the spatial period of a periodic wave—the distance over which the wave's shape repeats. It is the distance between consecutive corresponding points of the same phase on the wave, such as two adjacent crests, t ...

s between ca. 0.7 and 19 µm. In arsenic triselenide, arsenic is covalently bonded to selenium, where arsenic has a formal

oxidation state In chemistry, the oxidation state, or oxidation number, is the hypothetical charge of an atom if all of its bonds to different atoms were fully ionic. It describes the degree of oxidation (loss of electrons) of an atom in a chemical compound. C ...

of +3, and selenium −2.

Solution processed thin film

Thin film selenide glasses have emerged as an important material for integrated photonics due to its high refractive index, mid-IR transparency and high non-linear optical indices. High-quality glass films can be deposited from spin coating method from ethylenediamine solutions.

References

Arsenic(III) compounds Selenides Optical materials Non-oxide glasses {{inorganic-compound-stub