Up-conversion luminescence of neodymium oxide nanocrystals-doped TiO 2 /ormosils composite films and strip waveguides

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Up‑conversion luminescence of neodymium oxide nanocrystals‑doped ­TiO2/ormosils composite films and strip waveguides Xuehua Zhang1   · Yuhao Xi1 · Shun Liu1 · Yang Bi1 · Wei Zhang1 · Fangren Hu1,2 Received: 3 August 2020 / Accepted: 27 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract Neodymium oxide nanocrystals are synthesized by an inverse microemulsion method. XRD, XPS and HRTEM are used to characterize the properties of the neodymium oxide nanocrystals. Results show that the prepared neodymium oxide particles have obvious "column” structure with a column width of 400 ~ 600 nm and a length of 1 ~ 4 µm and have nanocrystalline structure with a high crystallinity. Neodymium-doped ­TiO2/organically modified silanes (ormosils) organic–inorganic composite films were prepared by using a sol–gel spin coating method. Up-conversion emission and optical transmittance of the films baked at different temperature were studied. Results indicate that the up-conversion emission occurs at about seven wavelength numbers of 387, 404, 421, 436, 450, 478 and 487 nm, of which the bright blue emission at 436 nm has the strongest intensity. There is a high optical transmittance value of above 88% for all the samples in the wavelength number 500 ~ 1000 nm. Optical waveguide properties including the optical transmission modes and loss of the composite films were measured. The photochemical properties of the composite films were also demonstrated by FTIR spectra. Besides, an energy level diagram was used to explain the mechanism of the up-conversion emission from neodymium oxide nanocrystals. Finally, strip waveguides with different waveguide sizes were built in the composite films through a UV soft nanoimprint technique and the surface morphology of the waveguides was observed by SEM. The as-prepared neodymium-doped composite films have potential applications in the areas of photonics and micro-optical devices. Keywords  Reverse microemulsion · Neodymium oxide nanocrystal · Composite films · Strip waveguides · Up-conversion

1 Introduction In recent years, the rare earth ions-doped materials have been widely studied by the researchers due to their special properties such as unusual fluorescence, nonlinear optical behaviors, size quantization and so on [1–4]. Among the rare earth ions, the neodymium (­ Nd3+) has attracted a great deal of interest and has been widely studied as an optically active ion in the rare earth-based new photonics devices due to its high quantum efficiency. We know that the 4f electronic * Xuehua Zhang [email protected] * Fangren Hu [email protected] 1



College of Electronic and Optical Engineering and College of Microelectronics, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu, China



Peter Grunberg Research Center, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu, China

2

level structures of neodymium ions provide many long-lived intermediate levels that can be populated with infrared radiation as well as metastable higher-lying levels that give rise to strong