A method to decorate the surface of LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺ powders with EuNbO₄ nanoparticles

Lithium niobate (LiNbO₃) is an inorganic material of great interest to optoelectronic technologies because of its good electro-optical properties. There are several approaches to produce changes in its microstructure or to engineering multi-component systems. In this work, we present an easy and efficient route for obtaining powders of europium doped lithium niobate (LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺) decorated with europium orthoniobate (EuNbO₄) nanoparticles (50–150 nm). This multi-component system, namely LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺-EuNbO₄ hereafter, has been obtained as powders through mechanochemistry processing of the precursors followed by heat treatments. The powders were structurally characterised by Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The EuNbO₄ nanoparticles have been grown from the LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺ grains displaying coherent interfaces. Moreover, LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺ and EuNbO₄ phases showed a high degree of crystallinity. Also, the system LiNbO₃:Eu³⁺-EuNbO₄ showed strong violet luminescence with CIE 1931 chromaticity coordinates x = 0.28376 and y = 0.23270 and CCT of 16859 K, which makes this system a candidate for building light-emitting devices for medical and biological applications.