Enhanced ultraviolet emission and its irreversible temperature antiquenching behavior of twofold coordinated silicon centers in silica glass

Abstract

It has been well documented that an oxygen divacancy center, or a twofold-coordinated Si center, in silica glass yields a singlet-to-singlet photoluminescence (PL) emission at 4.4 eV with a decay time of ∼4 ns. Although the 4.4-eV PL band is interesting in terms of a deep-ultraviolet light emitter, the emission efficiency has been too low to be considered for a practical application. In this work, we show that a highly luminescent silica glass, with an internal quantum yield of 68% for the 4.4-eV PL band at room temperature, can be prepared when micrometer-sized silica powders are heat treated at ∼1900 °C under inert gas atmosphere by using a high-frequency induction heating unit equipped with a graphite crucible. We also show that the intensity of the 4.4-eV emission in the thus prepared silica glass exhibits an irreversible temperature antiquenching behavior in the temperature region below ∼320 K during heating-cooling cycles. The anomalous temperature dependencies of the 4.4-eV emission can be interpreted in terms of thermally activated trapping-detrapping processes of photoexcited electrons associated with deep trap states.