Effects of different organic additives on the formation of YPO4:Eu3+ nano-/microstructures under hydrothermal conditions with enhanced photoluminescence

In this paper, we report a simple and convenient method toward fabrication of YPO4:Eu3+ with controlled crystal structures, morphologies and enhanced luminescent intensity. By simply adding different organic additives during the hydrothermal process, tetragonal YPO4:Eu3+ and hexagonal YPO4·0.8H2O:Eu3+ with nano-/microstructures can be obtained. Meanwhile, the possible formation mechanisms for products with different structures and morphologies have been presented. Furthermore, the luminescent properties of YPO4:Eu with different structures and morphologies were also studied and compared. We believe the method reported here could open a novel approach to rare earth phosphates with multiple structures.