Facile synthesis of monodisperse LuPO4:Eu3+/Tb3+ hollow nanospheres and their luminescence properties.

Highly uniform and well-dispersed LuPO4 hollow nanospheres were successfully synthesized via a facile solution-phase method by utilizing the colloidal spheres of Lu(OH)CO3 as a sacrificial template and NH4H2PO4 as a phosphorus source. X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transformed infrared (FT-IR), photoluminescence (PL) spectra, and cathodoluminescence (CL) spectra were employed to characterize the samples. The result indicates that the hollow LuPO4 spheres can be indexed to the tetragonal phase. The hollow LuPO4 spheres with diameter of about 300 nm become larger with respect to the sacrificial template. The shell of the hollow microspheres consists of numerous nanorods with the thickness of approximately 10 nm. Moreover, the possible formation mechanism of the evolution from Lu(OH)CO3 spheres to the final hollow LuPO4 hollow spheres has been proposed. In addition, upom ultraviolet (UV) and low-voltage electron beams excitation, 5 mol% Eu3+ and 5 mol% Tb3+ doped LuPO4 samples exhibit strong orange-red and green emission, corresponding to the characteristic lines of Eu3+ and Tb3+ under UV excitation, respectively, which may find potential application in the fields of color display and biomedicine.