A significant enhancement in the photoluminescence emission of the Mg doped ZrO2 thin films by tailoring the effect of oxygen vacancy
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- 作者：S. Salari ; F.E. Ghodsi ; feghodsi@guilan.ac.ir
- 关键词：Magnesium doped ZrO2 ; Sol-gel ; Annealing environment ; Photoluminescence
- 刊名：Journal of Luminescence
- 出版年：2017
- 出版时间：February 2017
- 年：2017
- 卷：182
- 期：Complete
- 页码：289-299
- 全文大小：3546 K
- 卷排序：182
文摘
Magnesium doped nanocrystalline ZrO2 thin films with the crystallite size in the range of 2 – 3.4 nm were synthesized via a facile sol-gel spin coating method. The solution was easily prepared by dissolving zirconium acetylacetonate (ZrAcAc) in methanol without adding any stabilizer or surfactant. The refractive index, porosity, and thickness of the grown films were simply calculated by transmittance spectra. The band gap values were estimated by using Kubelka-Munk function F(R). In the plot of (F(R)hν/t)2 versus hν, some transition bands were revealed in the band gap region of the samples. In order to thorough investigation of the band structure of Mg doped zirconia, the photoluminescence spectra of the samples at four different excitation wavelengths were recorded. It is suggested that the nature of the observed emission is mainly due to the oxygen vacancy, which has a significant role in the stabilization of tetragonal phase. This hypothesis is further confirmed by exploring the effect of different annealing environment (argon, nitrogen, and oxygen) on the photoluminescence intensity of the 5% Mg doped ZrO2 thin films. A considerable improvement in the PL intensity of the samples after annealing in argon environment was observed. It is suspected that annealing in an inert argon-rich environment increases the number of oxygen vacancies.