Impurity-sensitized luminescence of rare earth-doped materials

Abstract

The accuracy of the theoretical model of impurity-sensitized luminescence in rare earth-doped materials presented here is adjusted to the demands of precise modern experimental techniques. The description is formulated within the double perturbation theory, and it is based on the assumption that electrostatic interactions between the subsystems that take part in the luminescence process are the most important ones. The amplitude of the energy transfer is determined by the contributions that represent the perturbing influence of the crystal-field potential and also electron correlation effects taken into account within the rare earth ions. In this way, the model is defined beyond the standard free ionic system and single configuration approximations. The new contributions to the energy transfer amplitude are expressed in the terms of effective tensor operators, and they contain the perturbing influence of various excited configurations. In order to maintain the high accuracy of the model, the radial integrals of all effective operators are defined within the so-called perturbed function approach. This means that they are evaluated for the complete radial basis sets of one electron functions of given symmetry, including the continuum.