Book Description

Thermoluminescence provides a method for studying properties of those crystalline imperfections which behave as electron traps and recombination centers in wide bandgap materials. This approach, however, has been used relatively little, possibly due to the fact that the shapes and intensities of thermoluminescent glow curves are functions of several experimental parameters and are often complicated by the overlapping of a number of individual glow peaks. In the present work, experimental parameters were isolated and some of their effects on thermoluminescent glow curves were analyzed. This yielded information on activation energies associated with trapping levels, the nature of the kinetics involved in electron transitions, and electron retrapping. A Type II-a diamond, which has a wide distribution of thermoluminescent glow peaks, was used in this work. (Author).