How to make silica luminescent?

The development of optoelectronic or even photonic devices based on silicon technology is still a great challenge. Silicon and its oxide do not possess direct optical transitions and, therefore, are not luminescent. The remaining weak light emission is based on intrinsic and extrinsic defect luminescence. Thus our investigations are extended to ion implantation into silica layers, mainly on overstoichiometric injection or isoelectronic substitution of both the constituents silicon or oxygen, i.e. by ions of the group IV (C, Si, Ge, Sn, Pb) or the group VI (O, S, Se). Such implantations produce new luminescence bands, partially with electronic–vibronic transitions and related multimodal spectra. Special interest should be directed to low-dimension nanocluster formation in silica layers. Comparing cathodoluminescence (CL), photoluminescence (PL), and electroluminescence (EL), still too small luminescence quantum yields are obtained.