Defect-related luminescent materials: synthesis, emission properties and applications

Abstract

Luminescent materials have found a wide variety of applications, including information displays, lighting, X-ray intensification and scintillation, and so on. Therefore, much effort has been devoted to exploring novel luminescent materials so far. In the past decade, defect-related luminescent materials have inspired intensive research efforts in their own right. This kind of luminescent material can be basically classified into silica-based materials, phosphate systems, metal oxides, BCNO phosphors, and carbon-based materials. These materials combine several favourable attributes of traditional commercially available phosphors, which are stable, efficient, and less toxic, being free of the burdens of intrinsic toxicity or elemental scarcity and the need for stringent, intricate, tedious, costly, or inefficient preparation steps. Defect-related luminescent materials can be produced inexpensively and on a large scale by many approaches, such as sol-gel process, hydro(solvo)thermal reaction, hydrolysis methods, and electrochemical methods. This review article highlights the recent advances in the chemical synthesis and luminescent properties of the defect-related materials, together with their control and tuning, and emission mechanisms (solid state physics). We also speculate on their future and discuss potential developments for their applications in lighting and biomedical fields.

Optical Nanoprobes for Ultrasensitive Immunoassay

“…Another unique property that can be used for sensing applications is luminescence or fluorescence. Compared with conventional molecular probes like organic dyes and fluorescent proteins, luminescent nanomaterials 7,9,14,15 (e.g., quantum dots [QDs], noble metal nanoclusters, upconversion nanomaterials, graphene oxides [GOs]/graphene, and carbon nanoparticles [CNPs]) possess attractive physicochemical features such as high luminescence efficiency, long lifetime, large Stokes and/or anti-Stokes shifts, narrow emission bands, and high resistance to photobleaching, depending on their size, shape, and composition. Moreover, some nanomaterials have the characteristic of fluorescence quenching, which occurs when the emission spectrum of the fluorophore overlaps with the surface plasmon band of the nanomaterial.…”

ALD/MLD fabrication of luminescent Eu-organic hybrid thin films using different aromatic carboxylic acid components with N and O donors

“…In particular, the presence of the bidentate nitrogen donor ligands was found to extend the photoluminescence excitation wavelength range to 6 | RSC Adv., 2016, 00, [1][2][3][4][5] This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 20xx…”

“…[1][2][3][4] The peculiar photoluminescence characteristics of these materials such as sharp emission lines, large Stokes shifts and long lifetimes originate from the parity and spin-forbidden lanthanide ion 4f-4f transitions. Trivalent lanthanide ions alone show extremely inefficient direct photoexcitation; the function of the organic component in the hybrid is to absorb light in the UV/visible spectral range and then transfer the energy to the lanthanide ions thus sensitizing the characteristic lanthanide luminescence.…”

Engineering oxygen vacancies towards self-activated BaLuAlxZn4−xO7−(1−x)/2photoluminescent materials: an experimental and theoretical analysis

“…[1][2][3][4] Although rare earth ions play an important role in the fabrication of new photoluminescent materials, the limited rare earth resources encourage researchers to investigate new rare earth-free luminescent materials for different optical applications. [5][6][7][8] The spectroscopic properties of the self-activated phosphors are generally governed by the optical transitions through the oxygen-vacancy-related states in the band gap, so that their excitation and emission spectra are strongly dependent on the chemical composition, intrinsic structural properties and different preparation conditions. [9][10][11][12] A kind of LnBaZn 3 AlO 7 (Ln = Lu, Sm) compound with the general structural type ''1147'' was firstly reported in 1996.…”