Modelling rare-earth doped BaMgF4: a potential laser material

Solid-state optical materials are a continuing field of study that has many important applications including la-sers. BaMgF4 is one material has been studied in detail however, no studies into the surface properties or crystal morphology have been carried out. This paper summa-rizes the key findings of a bulk study into the material and extends it to consider the morphology of BaMgF4 be-fore looking at the segregation of rare earth dopants de-fect clusters to the low index surfaces. It is shown that there is strong segregation to all of the three morphology-dominating surfaces.