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Physical review. B, Solid state

Simultaneous Energy Transfer and Optical Absorption in Condensed Matter

M. Altarelli, David L. Dexter

Published Jun 15, 1973• 17 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A discussion is given of the probability of absorbing a photon while simultaneously transferring electronic excitation energy from an already excited impurity. Estimates are given for several types of systems. A comparison is made with the probability for two-photon absorption (which is much smaller) and cooperative transfer processes. Several possible experiments are suggested.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.7.5335

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A discussion is given of the probability of absorbing a photon while simultaneously transferring electronic excitation energy from an already excited impurity. Estimates are given for several types of systems. A comparison is made with the probability for two-photon absorption (which is much smaller) and cooperative transfer processes. Several possible experiments are suggested.
tion of a single photon by a pair of rare-earth ions in a crystal, acting in cooperation. Neither ion by itself could possibly absorb the photon, since no single-ion state exists at the photon energies involved. Absorption of light occurs discretely at sums of energy-level separations in the two ions and is detected experimentally by the excitation spectrum of one of the emission lines. This is an extremely important new effect which will doubtless have important practical applications in the future as well as obvious scientific implications. It should be emphasized that this is not, in any significant degree, excitation of a molecular state. The basic reason this phenomenon is so unusual is related to the fact that the interaction of radiation with matter consists of a sum of one-electron operators, A Vi, where A is the vector potential. From this point of view, only one electron at a time could possibly be excited, hence only one ion. In this paper a procedure for computing the probability of this effect is outlined, and some of the implications of the associated phenomena are discussed. These views can be found expressed in greater detail in ref. 2.
The absorption of a single photon by the simultaneous excitation of two rare-earth ions was first reported by Varsanyi and Dieke in 1961.1 D. L. Dexter explained this unusual observation by including the electron-electron interactions (that also give rise to energy transfer) between the rare earth ions with perturbation theory.2 In the 70's Dexter became interested in electronic-vibrational coupling. A theory of two-center optical transitions was developed for a rare-earth ion weakly coupled to a high energy, internal vibrational mode of a near-lying ion.3 Using theoretical techniques that had been developed for rare-earth ion pairs, intensities and selection rules could be determined.
Calculations made of the rates for several processes involving interactions between rare earth ions in crystals, such as resonance energy transfer, cooperative excitation transfer and cooperative optical transitions. These processes are assumed to originate from the electric multipole interactions between the ions concerned. A tensor operator method is employed in order to take account of the individual characters of the energy levels involved in the transition. Evaluation of the typical transition probability is also made on the lowest-order parity-allowed processes in nearest neighbour ions. The rates for the resonance transfer and cooperative transfer processes thus estimated are much smaller than those obtained by Miyakawa and Dexter.