Abstract
We show that europium doped ZnO nanowires after surface modification with organic ligand, 1,10 phenanthroline (phen) leads to strong red emission at 613 nm which is a characteristic emission from the atomic levels of Eu3+. Surface modification with phen leads to formation of phenanthroline-europium interface on the surface of the nanowires due to attachment of Eu3+ ions. After an optimized surface modification with phen, intensity of both the UV emission (band edge) and red emission improved by two orders of magnitude at room temperature. We observed multiple energy transfer pathways to the energy levels of Eu3+ ions through the phenanthroline-europium interface, which found to be very effective to the significant enhancement of emission from the dopant Eu3+. This study shows a new insight in to the energy transfer process from phen to the europium doped ZnO system.
Highlights
ZnO is known for its rich varieties of nanoscale phenomenon and related applications into various fields.[1,2,3,4,5] As a direct wide band gap semiconductor, ZnO is considered for the fabrication of UV light source
Structural characterization of the europium doped ZnO (Eu):ZnO NWs was done from the x-ray diffractometer (XRD) pattern (Fig. 1), which shows the characteristic peaks of pure hexagonal wurtzite phase
We successfully prepared 1, 10 phenanthroline-europium interface in the Eu:ZnO NWs which shows distinguishable red emission at 613 nm that arise from Eu3+ ions
Summary
Thermal treatment or nonequilibrium ion implantation process.[11,13,19,20] these routes use quite complex techniques/processes and obtained intensity of the red emission cannot be linked to the process parameters It has been known for a long time that surface sensitization by a ligand molecules can enhance luminescence by enabling radiationless energy transfer pathways from the sensitizer to the activator (the dopant atoms).[21] Organic ligands with larger conjugated benzene rings present strong absorption ability in the UV region and are able to sensitize the lanthanoids by possible energy transfer to the corresponding resonance energy level. The second energy transfer pathway in the phenanthroline-europium interface was not observed in previous studies
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