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Desirable phosphors for lighting, scintillation and composite films must have good light absorption properties, high concentration quenching, high quantum efficiency, a narrow color emission, and so forth. In this work, we first show that undoped yttrium hafnate Y 2 Hf 2 O 7 (YHO) nanoparticles (NPs) display dual blue and red bands after excitation using 330 nm light. Based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations, these two emission bands are correlated with the defect states arising in the band-gap region of YHO owing to the presence of neutral and charged oxygen defects. Once doped with Eu 3+ ions (YHOE), the YHO NPs show a bright red emission, a long excited state lifetime and stable color coordinates upon near-UV and X-ray excitation. Concentration quenching is active when Eu 3+ doping reaches 10 mol% with a critical distance of ∼4.43 Å. This phenomenon indicates a high Eu 3+ solubility within the YHO host and the absence of Eu 3+ clusters. More importantly, the optical performance of the YHOE NPs has been further improved by lithium co-doping. The origin of the emission, structural stability, and role of Li + -co-doping are explored both experimentally and theoretically. DFT calculation results demonstrate that Li + -co-doping increases the covalent character of the Eu 3+ –O 2− bonding in the EuO 8 polyhedra. Furthermore, the YHOE NPs have been dispersed into polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to make transparent nanocomposite films, which show strong red emission under excitation at 270 and 393 nm. Overall, we demonstrate that the YHO NPs with Eu 3+ and (Eu 3+ /Li + ) doping have a high emission intensity and quantum efficiency under UV and X-ray excitation, which makes them suitable for use as phosphors, scintillators and transparent films for lighting, imaging and detection applications. 

Abstract In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) 1 . These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower 2 , which culminates in the formation of detectable hadrons. Studying the pattern of the parton shower is one of the key experimental tools for testing QCD. This pattern is expected to depend on the mass of the initiating parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, which predicts a suppression of the gluon spectrum emitted by a heavy quark of mass m Q and energy E , within a cone of angular size m Q / E around the emitter 3 . Previously, a direct observation of the dead-cone effect in QCD had not been possible, owing to the challenge of reconstructing the cascading quarks and gluons from the experimentally accessible hadrons. We report the direct observation of the QCD dead cone by using new iterative declustering techniques 4,5 to reconstruct the parton shower of charm quarks. This result confirms a fundamental feature of QCD. Furthermore, the measurement of a dead-cone angle constitutes a direct experimental observation of the non-zero mass of the charm quark, which is a fundamental constant in the standard model of particle physics.