Rietveld refinement, optical and photoluminescence properties of blue emitting phosphors RE(Y, Er, Gd, La, Nd)-doped CaBPO5

In this paper, we have reported a systematic study on the effect of dopant ion type on the structural, luminescent and optical properties of calcium borophosphates using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Rietveld analysis, vacuum ultraviolet photoluminescence (VUV-PL), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DFS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis. The RE:CaBPO5 powders were successfully prepared by the solid-state reaction method. The XRD with full structural Rietveld refinement reveals that all rare earth doped calcium borophosphates have hexagonal structure. All the powders exhibit as blue phosphors with varying intensities. When we compare the luminescence intensity of the compounds, gadolinium doped calcium borophosphate has the highest intense whereas yttrium doped calcium borophosphate has lowest one. We also observed a strong correlation between the luminescent and optical behavior of the RE doped calcium borophosphates.