Structural, optical and electrical properties of luminescent (ZnS)1−x(MnTe)x powders

Intense photo and mechanoluminescent (ZnS)1−x(MnTe)x powder samples with x = 0.02, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 and 0.25 were prepared by simple solid state reaction method. All samples were polycrystalline with wurtzite structure. Wurtzite lattice parameters increased with composition ‘x’ linearly obeying Vegard's law. Both in photoluminescence and in mechanoluminescence an emission band was observed in red region at 650 nm. The band gap of the samples decreased with increase of composition ‘x’. Metal–Semiconductor transition was observed in all (ZnS)1−x(MnTe)x samples. The activation energies of the samples were found to be in the range 65–89 meV.