On the saturation of Tb phosphors under cathode-ray excitation. I. Excited-state absorption in Tb-activated phosphor powders

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Optical transitions between the 5D4 excited state of the Tb3+ (4f)8 configuration and the crystal-field split components of the (4f)7(5d) configuration are observed using high-resolution laser excitation of Tb-doped powder samples at room temperature. Excited-state absorption spectra of Tb3+ in YAG, YAGaG, Y2SiO5, and LaOBr are presented. Superimposed on the broadband excitation spectrum of these transitions we find the relatively narrow 4f→4f lines. We present a theoretical model for interpreting the 4f→5d transitions, which predicts a strict proportionality between the (4f)8 5D4→(4f)7(5d) and the (4f)8 7F6→(4f)7(5d) transitions. This model is used to estimate the optical-absorption cross section for the former transitions. Although the terminating 4f levels lie at the same energy as the 5d bands, the 4f→4f transitions can be interpreted on the basis of the Judd-Ofelt theory. We derived a method for calibration of the Tb3+ 4f→5d fluorescence-excitation spectra from powder samples. For YAG:Tb, the resulting optical cross sections were confirmed by direct-absorption measurements on a Tb3+ -doped epitaxial YAG layer. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the probabilities for excited-state absorption to highly excited 5d and 4f states in Tb3+ have been obtained theoretically and experimentally from Tb-doped powder materials.