Rare-earth free self-luminescent Ca2KZn2(VO4)3 phosphors for intense white light-emitting diodes

The commercially available white-light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) are made with a combination of blue LEDs and yellow phosphors. These types of WLEDs lack certain properties which make them meagerly applicable for general illumination and flat panel displays. The solution for such problem is to use near-ultraviolet (NUV) chips as an excitation source because of their high excitation efficiency and good spectral distribution. Therefore, there is an active search for new phosphor materials which can be effectively excited within the NUV wavelength range (350-420 nm). In this work, novel rare-earth free self-luminescent Ca2KZn2(VO4)3 phosphors were synthesized by a citrate assisted sol-gel method at low calcination temperatures. Optical properties, internal quantum efficiency and thermal stability as well as morphology and crystal structure of Ca2KZn2(VO4)3 phosphors for their application to NUV-based WLEDs were studied. The crystal structure and phase formation were confirmed with XRD patterns and Rietveld refinement. The optical properties of these phosphor materials which can change the NUV excitation into visible yellow-green emissions were studied. The synthesized phosphors were then coated onto the surface of a NUV chip along with a blue phosphor (LiCaPO4:Eu2+) to get brighter WLEDs with a color rendering index of 94.8 and a correlated color temperature of 8549 K.