Inhibited Long-Scale Energy Transfer in Dysprosium Doped Yttrium Vanadate Inverse Opal

In this article, we first fabricate YVO4:Dy3+ (n = 1.98) inverse opal photonic crystals (PCs) through the polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) template and the photonic stop bands (PSB) of the PCs controlled on the emissions of yellow (4F9/2–6H13/2) and blue (4F9/2–6H15/2) of Dy3+, respectively. Strong modification on steady-state emission spectra and luminescent dynamics are observed at room temperature. It is interesting to observe that the spontaneous emission rates (SER) of the PCs are suppressed as high as 230–250% in contrast to the reference grinded powder samples (REF) due to the change of effective refractive index (neff). The more significant, the studies on the temperature-dependent emissions indicate that in the inverse opals, the long-scale energy transfer (ET) among Dy3+ ions and vanadate groups is greatly inhibited, and thus the temperature-quenching of photoluminescence (PL) is considerably suppressed. As a consequence, the luminescent quantum yield of the YVO4:Dy3+ inverse opals increases greater than that of the REF samples. This work shows that inverse opal PCs of RE ions have great application potential in novel devices of lighting and display.