Recent progress in lanthanide-doped luminescent glasses for solid-state lighting applications—a review

Nowadays, solid-state white light-emitting diodes (wLEDs) have attracted remarkable attention for applications in general lighting, displays and numerous electronical devices due to their eminent efficiency, longer lifetime and higher mechanical durability compared to traditional incandescent and fluorescent lights. In current commercial wLEDs, a combination of Y3Al5O12:Ce3+yellow phosphor with blue LED chip and epoxy resin is generally used to generate white light. However, there are some considerable frailties mostly originated from phosphor and resin such as, degradation upon heat, and moisture, inhomogeneous spectral distribution, and poor color rendering capability. Therefore, phosphor embedded glass-ceramics have been developed as a promising way to obtain durable solid-state lighting devices. However, in these methods, there is a greater risk of reactions between the phosphor material and the glass host. At this point, lanthanide-doped luminescent glasses have drawn great attention as a new generation phosphor and/or epoxy free white-light-emitting source owing to their favorable properties including high thermal and chemical stability, high transparency, and easy manufacturing process. This review article aims to comprehensively summarize the recent progress in singly (i.e., Dy3+, Eu2+), doubly (i.e., Dy3+/Eu3+, Dy3+/Tm3+, Dy3+/Ce3+, Ce3+/Sm3+, Ce3+/Tb3+) and triply (i.e., Ce3+/Tb3+/Mn2+, Eu3+/Tb3+/Tm3+, Ce3+/Tb3+/Eu3+, Tm3+/Tb3+/Sm3+, Ce3+/Dy3+/Eu3+, Ho3+/Tm3+/Yb3+, Er3+/Tm3+/Yb3+) lanthanide-doped glasses for solid-state lighting applications through down-shifting and up-conversion emissions. Theoretical background including energy transfer mechanisms, glass synthesis methods, radiative and colorimetric properties are given in details. Finally, various effective strategies are highlighted that minimize the critical challenges associated with lanthanides-such as providing energy transfer from quantum dots or nanoparticles to lanthanides, and doping lanthanides in low phonon energy glass-to improve the white light emission of luminescent glasses and broaden their application areas.