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Improving upconversion luminescence efficiency in Er3+-doped NaYF4 nanocrystals by two-color laser field

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Abstract

Improving upconversion luminescence efficiency of lanthanide-doped nanocrystals is always a hot topic for scientists because of its very important application in photonics, photovoltaics, biological imaging, security printing, and therapeutics. Two-color laser field has shown to be a well-established strategy to further improve the upconversion luminescence efficiency. Here, we first propose a two-color laser field combining the 850 and 980 nm lasers to improve the green and red upconversion luminescence efficiency in Er3+-doped NaYF4 nanocrystals. In this work, an important advantage for our strategy is that the population is directly pumped to the radiation energy level of the upconversion luminescence by a cooperation excitation process, but not the spontaneous decay from other higher energy levels, and so the higher luminescence enhancement efficiency can be obtained. These studies also provide a clear physical picture for the physical control mechanism of the upconversion luminescence efficiency improvement, which can pave a way to properly design the laser fields in the future study of upconversion luminescence generation and control.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51132004 and No. 11474096) and Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 14JC1401500). We acknowledge the support of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, People’s Republic of China

    Yunhua Yao, Ye Zheng, Chengshuai Yang, Pei Liu, Jingxin Ding, Tianqing Jia, Shian Zhang & Zhenrong Sun

  2. State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, People’s Republic of China

    Cheng Xu & Jianrong Qiu

  3. NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, 200062, People’s Republic of China

    Shian Zhang

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  1. Yunhua Yao
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  2. Cheng Xu
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  3. Ye Zheng
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Correspondence to Shian Zhang or Zhenrong Sun.

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Yao, Y., Xu, C., Zheng, Y. et al. Improving upconversion luminescence efficiency in Er3+-doped NaYF4 nanocrystals by two-color laser field. J Mater Sci 51, 5460–5468 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-016-9849-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-016-9849-z

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