An analysis of the damaging process in Europium doped BaAlMg10O17

The present work has been carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in the High-Brilliance X-Ray Spectroscopy beam-line ID26 under the supervision of Pieter Glatzel and Lucia Amidani. The topic is the study and simulation of spectroscopic data concerning the crystal phosphor BaMgAl10O17 doped with Europium or Manganese or both. Despite the high luminescence yield gained with the inclusion of the two metals, the material faces damaging when exposed to heating or irradiation. The aim is to identify the main physical phenomenon underlying the loss in luminescence starting from the two most cited in literature: oxidation of Europium and structural changes in the crystal. Two main techniques of analysis will be employed: a statistical tool, named Principal Component Analysis, and the first-principle simulation of spectral features. The first will be addressed to the study of an irradiation-related dataset, while the second will both try to calculate electronic structures and assess the reliability of the two software by comparing their results.