High color rendering index white light emitting diodes fabricated from a combination of carbon dots and zinc copper indium sulfide quantum dots

Abstract

In a line with most recent trends in developing non-toxic fluorescent nanomaterials, we combined blue emissive carbon dots with green and red emissive zinc copper indium sulfide (ZCIS) core/shell quantum dots (QDs) to achieve white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) with a high color rendering index of 93. This indicates that ZCIS QDs, with their broad emission bands, can be employed to effectively make up the emission of carbon dots in the yellow and red regions to produce WLEDs in the wide region of color temperature by tuning the volume ratio of these constituting luminophores. Their electroluminescence characteristics including color rendering index, Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE) color coordinates, and color temperatures were evaluated as a function of forward current. The CIE-1931 chromaticity coordinates of the as-prepared WLEDs, exhibiting good stability, were slightly shifted from (0.321, 0.312) at 10 mA to (0.351, 0.322) at 30 mA, which was mainly caused by the different thermal quenching coefficients of carbon dots and ZCIS QDs.