2 decades ago, in late 1980's Y2O3 hit headlines, not due to what it did, but due to a material for which it was used as a starting precursor. Y2O3 was one of the starting materials for synthesis of a compound called yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa2Cu3O). This resulting material became one of the most well studied, high temperature superconductor of that era.

In this paper, we take a step back to analyze Y2O3, and ways of making it. We developed a simple, one-step protocol for the synthesis of Y2O3 - it turns out that we managed to engineer this material for both photoluminescent (PL) and thermoluminescent (TL) applications. Photoluminescence simply means getting light out, by exciting the material using light (usually of higher frequency). Thermoluminescence means getting light out of the material by heating it.

In this work we show that by simply switching one experimental parameter (which happens to be an organic fuel in our case), we could make either photoluminescent or thermoluminescent material. Specifically when a organic compound, ethylene diamine tetracetic acid (EDTA) was used in the reaction mix, a nice thermoluminescent Y2O3 was obtained; but when its disodium derivative (Na2-EDTA), we obtain a better photoluminescent material! The resultant material is inevitably made of smaller particles (10-30 nanometers). Use of Na2-EDTA results in slightly larger particles, hinting at the role of sodium in grain growth of Y2O3. The physics of defects of Y2O3 was explored using analysis of the thermoluminescence data.

Ref: Journal of Alloys and Compounds 585, 129-137 (2014)