Influence of local-field effects on the radiative lifetime of liquid suspensions of Nd:YAG nanoparticles

We measured the radiative lifetime of Nd:YAG nanopowder with an average particle size of 20nm suspended in different organic and inorganic liquids. To extract information regarding local-field effects, we fitted the experimental data to three different local-field models: the virtual-cavity (or Lorentz) model, the real-cavity model, and the no-local-field-effects model. The real-cavity model and the no-local-field-effects model can both be adequately fitted to our experimental results, while the virtual-cavity model can be ruled out.