Temperature Quenching of Yellow Ce 3+ Luminescence in YAG:Ce

Yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) doped with Ce3+ is the phosphor of choice for the conversion of blue to yellow light in the rapidly expanding market of white light LEDs, but it is generally thought to suffer from a low luminescence quenching temperature. The luminescence quenching temperature is an important parameter, especially in high-power LEDs, but surprisingly no systematic research has been done to measure and understand the temperature quenching of the yellow Ce luminescence in YAG:Ce. Here we report on the luminescence temperature quenching in YAG:Ce. For a wide range of Ce concentrations (between 0.033% and 3.3%) the temperature dependence of the emission intensity and the luminescence lifetimes are…