“…Surprisingly, the nature of this NIR photoluminescence is still unknown, although many hypotheses have been formulated, attributing emission to Bi 5+ [37][38][39][40], Bi-clusters [17], Bi + [22,23,25,26,28,34,35], BiO [8,31,41], dimer ions Bi 2 , Bi 2 − and Bi 2 2− [11,12,24,42], Bi 0 [43,44], molecular orbital models [40,45,46] or even point defects [21]. In the present paper, all these attempts to clarify the origin of NIR emission will be critically evaluated with the goal to condense the accumulated information into a potential resolution of the problem, and to identify directions for future research.…”