Lattice site and photoluminescence of erbium implanted in alpha-A1(2)O(3)

Single-crystal sapphire (alpha-Al2O3) was implanted at room temperature with 200 keV erbium ions to a fluence of 8 x 10(13) cm(-2). Ion channeling using 1.6 MeV He+ shows that the crystal suffers little damage for this low dose implant. Angular scans through axial and planar directions in the crystal indicate that 70% of the Er atoms reside on displaced octahedral sites in the alpha-Al2O3 lattice. As pure Al2O3 has a high density of free octahedral sites, this explains why high concentrations of Er can be dissolved in this material. Smaller fractions of Er are found on tetrahedral (20%) and random (10%) sites. The samples exhibit strongly peaked photoluminescence spectra around 1.5 mu m, due to intra-4f transitions in Er3+, indicating the existence of well-defined sites for the luminescing Er3+ ions. It is concluded that the octahedral site is the dominating optically active site in the lattice.