The doped materials of trivalent cerium ions and trivalent ytterbium ions can be used as scintillators to detect ionizing radiation. In this work, we investigated the luminescence property of Ce 3+ /Yb 3+ co-doped silica materials. Our samples with 0.06 mol % Ce 3+ , x mol % Yb 3+ ($x$ = 0, 0.03, 0.06, 0.09 and 0.30) co-doped silica were prepared by sol-gel method using tetraethoxysilane, cerium nitrate hexahydrate (Ce(NO 3 ) 3 .6H 2 O) and ytterbium nitrate pentahydrate (Yb(NO 3 ) 3 .5H 2 O) as precursors. The excitation spectra show that the peak at 327 nm of excitation spectrum monitored at 974 nm of the Yb 3+ emission matches well with the peak position monitored at 438 nm of the Ce 3+ emission, which indicates that there is energy transfer from Ce 3+ to Yb 3+ in the luminescence process of Ce 3+ Yb 3+ co-doped silica samples. The emission spectra show that with the increase of Yb 3+ doping concentration, the luminescence intensities of Ce 3+ decrease gradually. The luminescence intensities of Yb 3+ increase first and then decrease. The optimum doping concentration of Yb 3+ is 0.06 mol %, and the mol concentration ratio of Ce 3+ to Yb 3+ is 1 : 1 in our experiments. According to the decay curve, the Ce 3+ /Yb 3+ co-doping has no obvious influence on the fluorescence lifetime of Yb 3+ ions. Meanwhile, the cathodoluminescence spectra show that the CL intensity of Ce 3+ /Yb 3+ co-doped silica is significantly higher than that of Yb 3+ -doped silica. The results show that Ce 3+ /Yb 3+ co-doped silica materials with broad-band absorption and near-infrared emission have a potential application in radiation detection.