Dear Colleagues,

The importance of luminescent materials in our daily life cannot be underestimated. They enable sustainable lighting technologies and cutting-edge electronic displays but are also crucial for out-of-sight applications such as telecommunication, radiation dosimetry, and detection. At the same time, novel applications in medical imaging, (nano)sensing, photovoltaics, etc. are on the rise. This leads to an increasing need for new and more specialized luminescent compounds which demand a thoughtful engineering of materials. Materials properties can be tweaked by adding one or several optical dopants (transition metals, lanthanides, actinides or so-called s² ions from the heavy p-block), changing the host crystals (all kinds of oxides, sulfides, nitrides, hydrides, etc.) or by manipulating native or charge-compensating defects. In the case of nanomaterials, the modification of the dimensions and shapes of the nanostructures can strongly affect the physical properties. This means that a huge parameter space needs to be explored, something which cannot be done efficiently unless reliable structure–property relations are available. A lot of electronic structure methods are being applied to this means, often strongly differing in methodology and assumptions. This Special Issue aims at providing a forum to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the entire zoo of electronic structure techniques and how they are combined with experimental studies in the quest for new and improved luminescent materials.

Dr. Jonas Joos
Guest Editor

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• luminescent materials
• nanomaterials
• lanthanides
• transition metal ions
• electronic structure
• materials engineering
• experimental and theoretical spectroscopy
• structure–property relations