Abstracts

The transition metal and rare earth ions with the unfilled 3d and 4f electron shells, respectively, are widely used in optical applications as active emitting ions in laser crystals and phosphors etc. The optical properties of such materials depend on interplay of electronic and structural properties of host compounds with electronic properties of impurities. In the present work an overview of spectroscopic properties of the 3d and 4f ions in a free state and in crystals will be given. Applications of several different approaches (e.g. crystal field theory, DFT-based computational techniques, configurational coordinate model etc) to various inorganic crystalline materials doped with these ions will be shown, with special emphasis on how to identify location of the impurity ions energy levels in the host band gap, calculate the splitting of the impurity ion’s energy levels etc. Examples of relations between the structure of crystalline solids and emission properties of impurities will be discussed.