Highly efficient and thermally stable photonic ceramic by controllable and full crystallization from glass

Polycrystalline ceramics are promising for a diverse range of applications in solid state laser, lighting, scintillator and optical storage. Unfortunately, current ceramic elaborations involves strict and complex synthetic procedures such as ultra-high pressure and vacuum processing. Here, we realize the tune of MgAlSiO and MgAlSiO phase formation in a glass by controlling the two crystal nucleation and growth individually, and obtain a polycrystalline non-stoichiometric MgAlSiO:Eu translucent ceramic by virtue of complete and congruent crystallization of the glass. Microstructural characterizations verify that the resulting ceramic exhibits dense and closely stacked micrometer-scale crystallites with very thin grain boundary structure. Chemical composition analysis by energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry revels the grain's composition is highly deviated from the stoichiometric MgAlSiO, with atomic ratio Mg/Al/Si of 1.00: 1.46: 2.70. The precipitated non-stoichiometric MgAlSiO, structurally having infinite channels z = 0.25 or 0.75 sites that run parallel to the -aix, provides an robust crystal-field environment for Eu 5d-4f transition. As a consequence, the ceramic produces intense emission with photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) up to 90 %, and excellent thermal stability emission with 70.1 % emission intensity at 420 K relative to that at room temperature, demonstrating it can be applied in high power lighting application with improved light quality by employing the ceramic as a color converter. Moreover, the ceramic also exhibits thermally stimulated luminescence at temperature reaching up to 700 K, originating from the deep electronic traps in MgAlSiO lattice with estimated trap depth of 0.73eV and 0.97eV. We also demonstrate the ceramic is hopeful for optical information storage application as the storage information can be retain well without vulnerable by the fluctuations of external environments due to the deep traps.