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Nature of the Electronic Charge Carriers Involved in Triboluminescence

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Triboluminescence

Abstract

Mechanical action, sometimes even gentle mechanical action such as rubbing and tumbling, can produce triboluminescence. The emitted light often comes from within the bulk. The question then arises: How is the energy transferred from the surface, where the mechanical action occurs, into the bulk? Key to understand this process lies with the peroxy defects, a type of defect in oxide materials that has been widely overlooked. Peroxy defects are ubiquitous in many materials. They consist of pairs of oxygen anions that have changed their valence from 2− to 1−. Under normal conditions the two O− are tightly coupled, localized, forming a very short O−–O− bond. However, this bond is also very labile. Slight variations in local lattice environment, even transient perturbations such as by sound waves, can cause the peroxy bonds to break. When this happens, electron-hole pairs are generated, of which the electrons are trapped in the broken peroxy bonds, while the holes turn into mobile charge carriers, “positive holes,” which have the ability to flow away from the sites where they had been generated, traveling far afield, propagating via a phonon-assisted electron hopping mechanism at speeds up to about 100 m/s. Chemically, positive holes are O− in a matrix of O2−, strongly oxidizing, able to oxidize transition metal cations. Positive holes can also recombine with broken peroxy bonds, in which case up to 2.4 eV may be released. This energy can be transferred to nearby transition metal cations causing them to become electronically excited. If these cations radiatively de-excite, luminescence will occur.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With k being the Boltzmann constant and T the absolute temperature.

  2. 2.

    Square brackets outline the essential parts of the point defects. V stands for vacancy. Subscript i means interstitial and subscripts identify the crystallographic site (except for oxygen sites, where subscripts are omitted). Superscripts prime, dot, and x designate single-negative, positive, and neutral charges, respectively, while double prime and double dot designate double-negative and positive charges, respectively, relative to the unperturbed crystal structure.

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Acknowledgments

The early part of this work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany, and the latter part primarily by NSF and NASA. Current support by NASA is provided by the grant #NNX12AL71G. I thank many students and coworkers who participated in this research and helped me develop the knowledge base, on which this chapter is based. Their names are listed as coauthors in the references given below.

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  1. GeoCosmo Science Center – NASA Ames Research Park, Bldg 19, Suite 1070-I, Moffett Field, 94035, CA, USA

    Friedemann T. Freund

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  1. Friedemann T. Freund
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Correspondence to Friedemann T. Freund .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Department, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    David O. Olawale

  2. Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Department, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Okenwa O. I. Okoli

  3. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

    Ross S. Fontenot

  4. Dept of Physics, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA

    William A. Hollerman

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Freund, F.T. (2016). Nature of the Electronic Charge Carriers Involved in Triboluminescence. In: Olawale, D., Okoli, O., Fontenot, R., Hollerman, W. (eds) Triboluminescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38842-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38842-7_2

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