Zinc sulphide photoluminescence under weak alternating electric field conditions

The phenomenon of the quenching of photoluminescence by a weak alternating electric field was examined in the light of theory and verified by experiments on zinc sulphides. It is believed that the quenching is brought about by processes in the local regions of the crystal which correspond to energy barriers and that quenching involves the transition of valence electrons, which have obtained their energy from the electrons accelerated by the field, into the levels of luminescence centres. The kinetics of the processes in the barriers has been considered both for a reverse bias (a half-period of de-excitations) and for a direct bias (a half-period of recombination), and an expression for the average (time) quenching was obtained. The quenching characteristics calculated from the expression for quenching correlate well with the experimental data.