Simply speaking, thermoluminescence (TL) is emission of light when an object is heated. Photoluminescence is light emission that occurs when a material is excited with light (usually wavelength of excitation source is lower than that the emitted light). Both these phenomena are quite sensitive to defects in the materials.

In this work, we show that an efficient light emitting material (phosphor) called Y2O3 can be made both photoluminescent (PL) and thermoluminescent (TL) by simply switching one experimental parameter during the synthesis process. There is a low-cost method for oxide nanomaterial synthesis called solution combustion technique. This technique usually involves a combustible mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer (just like chemistry involved in fire crackers!). We show that by simply switching the fuel used for synthesis, luminescence property can be tuned for different applications! Detailed investigation of influence of fuel nature on structural and luminescence characteristics of Y2O3 and their correlations have been explored. We also hypothesize the possible reasons for the observed spectral characteristics in detail.