Structural and luminescent properties of europium doped TiO2 thick films synthesized by the ultrasonic spray pyrolysis

The structural and luminescent properties of trivalent europium-doped titanium dioxide films synthesized by the ultrasonic spray pyrolysis technique at several substrate temperatures are reported. These films are nanocrystalline and present a mixture of tetragonal (anatase and rutile) crystal structures of the titania as determined by x-ray diffraction. The rutile crystal structure became predominant as the substrate temperature during deposition was increased. Under UV and electron beam excitation, these coatings showed strong luminescence due to f–f transitions and the dominant transition was the hypersensitive 5D0 →7F2 red emission of Eu3+. The photo- and cathodoluminescence characteristics of these films were studied as a function of growth parameters such as substrate temperature and europium concentration. Excitation with a wavelength of 396 nm resulted in photoluminescent emission peaks located at 557, 580, 592, 615, 652 and 703 nm, associated with the electronic transitions of the Eu3+ ion. The photoluminescence (PL) intensity as a whole is observed to decrease as the deposition temperature is increased. Also, with increasing doping concentration, a quenching of the PL is observed. The chemical composition and surface morphology characteristics of the films are also reported

Enhanced sensistivity at higher-order exceptional points

Non-Hermitian degeneracies, also known as exceptional points, have recently emerged as a new way to engineer the response of open physical systems, that is, those that interact with the environment. They correspond to points in parameter space at which the eigenvalues of the underlying system and the corresponding eigenvectors simultaneously coalesce1,2,3. In optics, the abrupt nature of the phase transitions that are encountered around exceptional points has been shown to lead to many intriguing phenomena, such as loss-induced transparency4, unidirectional invisibility5,6, band merging7,8, topological chirality9,10 and laser mode selectivity11,12. Recently, it has been shown that the bifurcation properties of second-order non-Hermitian degeneracies can provide a means of enhancing the sensitivity (frequency shifts) of resonant optical structures to external perturbations13. Of particular interest is the use of even higher-order exceptional points (greater than second order), which in principle could further amplify the effect of perturbations, leading to even greater sensitivity. Although a growing number of theoretical studies have been devoted to such higher-order degeneracies14,15,16, their experimental demonstration in the optical domain has so far remained elusive. Here we report the observation of higher-order exceptional points in a coupled cavity arrangement—specifically, a ternary, parity–time-symmetric photonic laser molecule—with a carefully tailored gain–loss distribution. We study the system in the spectral domain and find that the frequency response associated with this system follows a cube-root dependence on induced perturbations in the refractive index. Our work paves the way for utilizing non-Hermitian degeneracies in fields including photonics, optomechanics10, microwaves9 and atomic physics17,18