Energy levels and crystal-field splittings of Nd3+ in yttrium oxide

Abstract

Studies of the absorption and fluorescence spectra of Nd3+ in yttrium oxide are reported in this paper. The three Racah parameters E 1,2,3 and the spin-orbit parameter f giving the best over-all agreement between the observed and calculated spectrum are E1=4853.9, E2 = 24.20, E3=471.87, and ξ = 877.59 cm-1. The Stark splittings of the four levels 4I9/2, 4I11/24I13/2, and 4I 15/2 are used in a first-order perturbation calculation to determine the crystal-field parameters for Nd3+ in the C2 sites of the Y2O3 lattice. The parameters are used to calculate the Stark splitting of 13 excited levels, and the results are compared with experimentally observed values. For 64 Stark components, the calculation predicts the splitting with an average of about 15 cm-1. For the components of the 2H11/2 and 2G7/2 levels, very large discrepancies are present.