Emission color tuning through manipulating the energy transfer from VO43- to Eu3+ in single-phased LuVO4:Eu3+ phosphors

Recently, rare earth (RE) ion doped single-phased phosphors, which can emit tunable colors upon single wavelength excitation, have received a great deal of attention, but most of them involve multiple dopants as luminescence centers. This work reports on single-phased LuVO4: Eu3+ phosphors with tunable emission colors upon a single wavelength excitation while using Eu3+ as a single dopant ion. The tunable emission is realized through precisely manipulating the energy transfer efficiency from VO43- to Eu3+ by controlling the Eu3+ doping content, which allows modulating the photoemission intensity ratio between VO43- and Eu3+ upon excitation at 265 nm and therefore color tuning from blue (0.2204, 0.2194) to red (0.6703, 0.2986). Time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy measurements reveal that the energy transfer process occurs 4 ms after the excitation and becomes dominant 10 ms later with the disappearance of the VO43- emission. The temperature-dependent PL spectra show that the energy transfer can be accelerated as the temperature increases, and it leads to abnormal enhancement of the Eu3+ emission at the earlier state. A similar scenario is not observed upon exciting the phosphors at the intrinsic absorption of Eu3+, which implies that the reversible energy transfer from Eu3+ to VO43- is impossible. Our results demonstrate a feasible strategy for tuning the emission color of single-phased phosphors through controlling the energy transfer process from the host to the dopant, and it opens up new possibilities for designing tunable luminescent materials for future optoelectronics applications.