Investigations of the g factors and hyperfine structure parameters for Er3+ ion in zircon-type compounds

The electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) g factors g(parallel), g(perpendicular) and hyperfine structure parameters A(parallel), A(perpendicular) of the tetragonal Er3+ centers in zircon-type compounds YXO4 (X = As, P, V), ScVO4 and RSiO4 (R = Zr, Hf, Th) are calculated from the perturbation formulas of EPR parameters for 4f11 ion in tetragonal symmetry. In these formulas, the second-order perturbation contributions are included in addition to the first-order perturbation contributions considered in the previous papers. The crystal-field parameters used in the calculations are obtained by analyzing the optical spectral data from the superposition model. Although the superposition model intrinsic parameters An(R0) used in this paper for Er3+ in various zircon-type compounds are not as scattered as those in the previous paper, the calculated results of both the optical spectra and EPR parameters show better agreement than those in the previous paper with the observed values, suggesting that the above calculation method and parameters are more reasonable. The contributions of the second-order perturbation terms to EPR parameters are also discussed.