Exciton-impurity luminescence from noncrystalline xenon-argon clusters

Abstract

For the first time in binary mixtures of solid rare gases exciton-impurity luminescence is observed from a xenon-argon system containing argon as impurity. An exciton-impurity emission band is registered for binary clusters with the structure of multilayer icosahedron. The optical transition occurs from an energy level lying very close to the lowest level of volume excitons in bulk xenon samples. The results demonstrate the possibility of probing excitonic levels in noncrystalline condensed media.

11 pages, 4 figures, the original version will be published in 'Low Temperature Physics' (December 2009)