Double nanocrystalline engineering for effective enhanced photoluminescence of Tb3+ in glass ceramic

Despite possessing good feature for optical thermometry, the rare (RE) ions-based temperature sensing (TS) has innate shortcoming of thermally coupled levels (TCLs) energy gap overlap, which reduces the sensitivity. In this work, a dual-luminous centers TS based on Tb³⁺ doped Cs₄PbBr₆ quantum dots (QDs) glass ceramic is fabricated. By locating in low phonon energy crystal field environment of Cs₂ZnSi₅O₁₂ nanocrystalline (NS) and Cs₄PbBr₆ QDs, the emission intensity of Tb³⁺ can be enhanced by 14 times. The large exciton binding energy (420 meV) indicates that the prepared QDs glass ceramic has a good thermal stability and the PL intensity of Cs₄PbBr₆ QDs and Tb³⁺ can be well-maintained above 70% and 89% after 8 thermal cycles between 323K and 373K. Furthermore, the obtained maximum absolute sensitivity (S_a) and relative sensitivity (S_r) is as high as 0.2541 K^-1 and 2.68% K^?1, respectively. It is expected that the finding of this work can offer a help in exploring novel QDs/RE ions-based TS and further optimize their practical applications.