Toward Bi3+ Red Luminescence with No Visible Reabsorption through Manageable Energy Interaction and Crystal Defect Modulation in Single Bi3+-Doped ZnWO4 Crystal

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed the discovery of tens of thousands of rare earth (RE) (e.g., Eu2+) and non-RE (e.g., Mn2+) doped photonic materials for near-ultraviolet (NUV) and blue converted white light-emitting diodes (wLEDs), but the future development of wLEDs technology is limited greatly by the intrinsic problems of these traditional dopants, such as the insurmountable visible light reabsorption, the weak absorption strength in NUV or blue region, and so on. Here we report a feasible strategy guided by density functional theory (DFT) calculation to discover novel Bi3+ red luminescent materials, which can solve the above problems eventually. Once the untraditional ion of bismuth is doped into ZnWO4 crystal, multiple defects can be possibly created in different charge states such as BiZn, BiW, interstitial Bi, and even defect complexes of 2 BiZnVW among others, and they, as DFT calculated results illustrate, have the potential to produce emission spanning from visible to near-infrared. As confirmed ...