Correction of excitation spectra of long persistent phosphors

Excitation spectra of persistent phosphors can suffer serious interference from afterglow. As a result, the appearance of excitation spectrum will depend on the scanning direction, scanning speed and pumping source intensity and the irradiation history of the sample. In this work, we propose an approach to correct excitation spectra of long persistent phosphors. The results of CaS : Bi3+ show that the corrected data will provide more precise information. In addition, the fitting result indicates that the second-order approximation is preferable for describing the decay of the afterglow of CaS:Bi3+. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.