White and Tunable Emission from and Rhodamine B Detection by Modified Zinc Oxide Nanowalls

To gain better optical and optoelectrical properties, doping trivalent lanthanide cations into host materials is a very attractive approach in nanoscience. Here, we use a transparent conducting oxide, zinc oxide, as the host material to directly embed trivalent terbium cations without the need for any postgrowth treatment, and we investigate the photophysical effect of the dopant. Trivalent Tb cations embedded in ZnO nanowalls produce hypersensitive green emission (at 545 nm, corresponding to the ⁵D₄ → ⁷F₅ transition) and convert the emission color of ZnO from yellow into white. Evidently, the photoluminescence emission intensity of Tb(III) is further increased by close to 10-fold due to the plasmonic effect introduced by noble metal (Ag and Pt) nanoparticles. The characteristic Tb(III) emission is found to be tunable from white to red and is examined for its potential chemosensing application for rhodamine B involving a plausible cascade energy transfer mechanism from ZnO to rhodamine B via Tb(III) cations.