Sintering and characterization of novel multilayered MgAl2O4/YAG, MgAl2O4/YSZ and YAG/YSZ ceramic-ceramic architectures for photonic applications

During layer-by-layer formation of Y3Al5O12 (YAG), MgAl2O4 (MAS), ZrO2–Y2O3 (YSZ) powders and their consolidation by the SPS method, multilayer YAG/MAS, YSZ/YAG and MAS/YSZ ceramics exhibiting functionally graded properties were synthesized. The morphological, mechanical, optical and luminescent properties have been studied in detail for fabricated ceramics. It is shown that the microhardness of both the ceramics layers and the separate single layers are comparable to each other. The transmission spectra of YSZ/YAG and YAG/MAS ceramics showed correlation with the transmission level prepared from monolayers of starting materials. For MAS/YSZ, this agreement was not found. It has been shown that the pulsed cathodoluminescence spectra of YSZ/YAG, YAG/MAS, and MAS/YSZ with a good agreement of existing luminescence centers nature for YAG, YSZ, and MAS multilayer ceramics. This work provides promising new microstructures in developing novel multilayered luminescent ceramics for photonic applications.