An investigation of n-type semiconductors based on optical and photoluminescence of pure and Al doped Pr:123 compound

• With n-type ZnO comparison, an investigation of AlPr:123 compounds as n-type semiconductors has been reported for the first time. • Although the structure is different between AlPr:123 and ZnO, the grain and crystallite sizes are comparable with each other. • We could increase the Debye temperature, Young’s modulus, q-factor, carrier density, lattice dielectric constant, energy gap, optical conductivity, and PL intensity of AlPr:123 samples to be higher than those obtained for ZnO. • A blue shift could be recorded in the PL spectra for the AlPr:123 samples as well as those obtained from ZnO. • These outcomes strongly recommend the AlPr:123 samples, to be better than ZnO, for plastic deformation, solar cells, light emission, supercapacitors, and high-power operation. • To best our knowledge, the present work has never been done before. With ZnO comparison, we report here an investigation of n-type semiconductors in terms of optical and photoluminescence (PL) analysis based on PrBa 2 Cu 3-3x Al 3x O y (AlPr:123) compound with (0.00 ≤ x ≤ 1.00). The structure is tetragonal of the samples with x ≤ 0.30 and changes to orthorhombic for x > 0.30, whereas it is wurtizite (hexagonal) for ZnO. As x increases to 1.00, the grain size is decreased, while the crystallite size and porosity are increased, but they are comparable with those obtained for ZnO. The Debye temperature, Young’s modulus and energy gap are drastically decreased by increasing x until reach to their maximum values of 623.14 K, 952 GPa and 3.45 eV for x = 1.00 (650.39 K, 17 GPa and 3.28 eV for ZnO). The x = 0.05 has increased the carrier density to 8.06 × 10 19 (cm −3 ), which is about 8-times higher than of ZnO (1.07 × 10 19 (cm −3 ). The highest value of q-factor (3.5 × 10 5 ) is obtained for x = 0.00, which is about 10-tims higher than of ZnO (3 × 10 4 ). As x increases above 0.30, the optical conductivity is significantly increased to be greater than that of ZnO. The PL intensity of the visible emission peaks was gradually increases against x until becomes higher than that of ZnO when x = 1.00. A slight UV shift is obtained for x ≤ 0.30 samples, but it changed to blue for x ≥ 0.60, which is typically similar to ZnO. As compared to ZnO, the present samples are strongly recommended for plastic deformation, solar cell, light emission, super-capacitor and high-power operation. To the best of our knowledge, the present work has never been done elsewhere.