Abstract
Eu3+-doped oxide thin films possess a great potential for several emerging applications in optics, optoelectronics, and sensors. The applications demand maximizing Eu3+ photoluminescence response. Eu-doped ZnO, TiO2, and Lu2O3 thin films were deposited by Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD). Pulsed UV Laser Annealing (PLA) was utilized to modify the properties of the films. In situ monitoring of the evolution of optical properties (photoluminescence and transmittance) at PLA was realized to optimize efficiently PLA conditions. The changes in optical properties were related to structural, microstructural, and surface properties characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The substantial increase of Eu3+ emission was observed for all annealed materials. PLA induces crystallization of TiO2 and Lu2O3 amorphous matrix, while in the case of already nanocrystalline ZnO, rather surface smoothening0related grains’ coalescence was observed.
Highlights
Eu3+ -doped oxide thin films possess great potential for several emerging applications in optics, optoelectronics, and sensors, i.e., waveguides, display luminophores, imaging detectors, solar cells, and scintillators [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
The Eu3+ -doped thin films are fabricated by a variety of methods [1,2], e.g., ion implantation [13], plasmaenhanced chemical vapor deposition [3,4,14], electrochemical deposition [5], hydrothermal deposition [15,16], chemical bath deposition [6], spraying [17,18], sputtering [4,7,8,19,20,21], evaporation [22,23], pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [24,25,26,27], matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation technique (MAPLE) [28], and sol-gel [9,10,29,30,31,32,33]
We report on in situ monitoring optical properties of Eu-doped ZnO, TiO2, and Lu2 O3 thin films prepared by PLD within their processing by Pulsed UV Laser Annealing (PLA) using ArF
Summary
Eu3+ -doped oxide thin films possess great potential for several emerging applications in optics, optoelectronics, and sensors, i.e., waveguides, display luminophores, imaging detectors, solar cells, and scintillators [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. As an example of well-known Eu3 dopant host matrices we can mention semiconducting ZnO, TiO2, and dielectric Lu2 O3 oxides. The methods used for conventional thermal annealing require heating the samples to high temperature (>700 ◦ C) for sufficiently long times in order for thermal diffusion of the defects to occur. The high-temperature processing limits the flexibility and practical applicability of these methods toward development of various optical and electro-optical devices. To address just the main disadvantages, only heat-resistant substrates can be used, undesirable crystallization of amorphous host might occur, and, the treatment of the entire sample may be undesirable in the device production
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