Influence of Li2+ Doping on the Structural and Optical Properties of CaO Synthesized by Sol–Gel Process

This work proposes the synthesis of nanocrystalline calcium oxide (CaO) pure and doped with different concentrations of lithium (Li[Formula: see text]) ions by sol–gel process. Calcium nitrate (Ca(NO[Formula: see text]4H2O; 99.99%) and lithium nitrate (LiNO3; 99.99%) were used as precursors. The synthesized powders were characterized by several techniques such as: UV-Vis transmission spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infra-red spectroscopy (FT-IR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The main objective of this paper is to study the influence of lithium (Li[Formula: see text] ratio) on the structural and optical properties of synthesized powders. The band gap values decreased with the increasing of Li[Formula: see text] ions in CaO lattice; the slight change in the band gap was directly related to the energy transfer between the CaO excited states and the 2s levels of Li[Formula: see text] ions. The influence of Li[Formula: see text] doping on the physical properties of CaO nanocrystalline will be studied for the first time in this work; no literature has previously published this kind of impurities.