Toward temperature‐dependent Bi3+‐related tunable emission in the YVO4:Bi3+ phosphor

Abstract

AbstractUp until now, many previous works have indicated us that the photoluminescence (PL) properties of phosphors sometimes can be changed with the change in the external temperature, resulting in the anomalous PL phenomena and correlated new applications that are difficult to achieve at room temperature. In this work, we report the temperature‐dependent Bi3+‐related PL properties in the YVO4:Bi3+ phosphor. Our findings show that increasing the temperature from 10 to 300 K enables manipulating the energy interaction from groups to Bi3+, thereby leading to the temperature‐induced color tuning from blue (0.183, 0.212) to yellow (0.418, 0.490). Upon this heating process, we further reveal that the dynamic Bi3+ luminescence has experienced a regular transition from double‐exponential to single‐exponential decay, which results in the decrease in the average Bi3+ lifetime from 122.606 to 0.376 μs. Discussions on the PL results imply that the tunable PL observations are due to the interplay of temperature‐dependent energy transfer from groups to Bi3+ and redistribution of the excited 3P0 and 3P1 states of Bi3+ upon the thermal stimulation. This work not only presents the temperature‐triggered Bi3+ tunable properties in the well‐studied YVO4 host lattice but also can provide new insights into revealing Bi3+‐related PL mechanism in other Bi3+‐doped photonic materials in the future and, in the meanwhile, gives some directive ideas for us to explore previously unnoticed applications for rare‐earth (RE; eg, Eu3+, Pr3+, Tb3+, Eu2+, Er3+, etc) and other non‐RE (eg, Bi3+, Mn4+, Mn2+, Cr3+, etc) doped phosphors.