Persistent Luminescence as Emergent Relaxation in a Disordered Kinetic Landscape

Persistent luminescence is commonly described using empirical multi-exponential or stretched-exponential models, which obscure the underlying kinetic structure of trap-mediated relaxation. Here, a kinetic landscape framework is introduced in which afterglow emission emerges from simple Markovian escape dynamics operating on a disordered distribution of trap energies.

In this picture, charge carriers relax through a heterogeneous landscape of trapping states, and the observed non-exponential decay arises from the statistical structure of this landscape rather than from complex dynamical mechanisms. After nondimensionalization, the kinetics are governed by two reduced parameters that describe trap depth and energetic disorder, whose coupling defines a dimensionless invariant that controls the long-time behavior.

These results establish persistent luminescence as an emergent relaxation phenomenon in a disordered kinetic landscape, providing a unifying framework that connects trap distributions, scaling behavior, and long-time decay across diverse material systems.