Emission Color Manipulation in Transparent Nanocrystals‐in‐Glass Composites Fabricated by Solution‐Combustion Process

Abstract

AbstractRational design and fabrication of multicolor fluorescent sources represent one of the significant challenges in the development of high‐performance solid‐state lighting, tunable coherent lasing, and full‐color display technologies. However, generation of simultaneous multicolor emission, especially white light generation with a wide color gamut is usually beyond the ability of a single material. Heterogeneous structures made by combinations of red, green, and blue emission building blocks are bulky, inefficient, complicated, and costly. Here reported is a bottom‐up strategy to generate simultaneous multicolor emission with continuous tunability in a single monolithic material based on the “nanocrystals‐in‐glass composite” (NGC) architecture. In this approach, a self‐sustained low‐temperature solution combustion process enables homogeneous solvent dispersion and eventually stable immobilization of multiple nanocrystals in transparent matrix. With transparency of up to 80%, further demonstrated is drawing of fiber from the melt of these combustion‐processed NGC materials. The optical spectra of the as‐drawn glass fiber can be precisely tuned and clustering is effectively suppressed. Moreover, the NGC materials exhibit remarkable anti‐thermal quenching behavior at temperatures of up to 200 °C. The bottom‐up strategy for NGC provides a versatile platform for the fabrication of high‐performance multifunctional fiber‐based devices for advanced applications in lasers, illumination, displaying, and biophotonics.