A novel fitting method for evaluating the thermal quenching parameters of TL with an application to undoped CVD diamond

There are a number of thermoluminescence (TL) phosphors (and CVD diamond among of them), for which the integrated TL response decreases with the increasing of the heating rate. This effect relates to the thermal quenching (TQ) of luminescence caused by the increasing the non-radiative recombination with the temperature increasing. In this work we present a new fitting method of evaluation the TQ parameters from a series of experimental TL glow curves recorded with variable heating rates. The method is simple, fast and effective. It quite general and can be applied to any series of TL glow curves consisting of several overlapped peaks and does not assume a particular type of TL kinetics. The only limitation of the method is that the end temperature of heating must be enough to ensure full readout of the analyzed TL peaks for all heating rates. The proposed method was applied to a series of TL glow curves measured with the heating rates from 0.1 to 17 K/s for the undoped CVD diamond film. The evaluated TQ parameters were found to be: an activation energy of 0.37 eV and a dimensionless constant of 3.7 × 10 ³.