Eu3+-Activated Sr3ZnTa2O9 single-component white light phosphors: emission intensity enhancement and color rendering improvement

Single-component white light phosphors with a broad and full color spectrum are urgently required to overcome residual problems with commercial phosphors. In this paper, we describe how Eu3+, as the dopant of Sr3ZnTa2O9 (SZT), plays an important role in structural modulation (including structural order-disorder and intrinsic oxygen defects), as demonstrated by electronic structural calculations and systematic experiments. Furthermore, D-5(0) F-7(2) emission of Eu3+ provides the red component of the emission spectrum and increases the color rendering index of SZT:Eu3+ phosphors. Consequently, the resulting phosphor SZT:10%Eu3+ shows significantly enhanced emission intensity, and its broadband emission covers the entire visible region from 400 nm to 720 nm. A fabricated LED device using a near-ultraviolet 370 nm chip coated with a single-component, the SZT:10%Eu3+ phosphor, shows warm white emission with a high color rendering index (R-a = 82).