(Invited) Phosphors-By-Design: Developing the Next Generation of Luminescent Materials for Solid State Lighting

Abstract

The development of rare-earth substituted phosphors generally relies on the chemical substitution of known compounds or searching phase-space to identify new materials. Yet, this approach often leads to the formation of known structure-types and incremental improvements of current luminescent materials. Transitioning beyond methods of classical materials discovery by turning to high-throughput computation and combinatorial algorithms has shown great promise in the development of new phosphors. A third method uses the combination of DFT-based computation and experiment to predict optical response. For example, calculating the Debye temperature and electronic band-gap of potential host compounds allows the selection of compounds from crystal structure databases ensuring only the best materials are experimentally explored. Our research has followed this approach to target a number of new luminescent materials ranging from borates to nitrides and showed an acceleration in materials discovery. Moreover, the complementary use of computation and synthesis provides an avenue for the fundamental understanding of the composition, structure, and property relationship necessary to advance the development of optical materials.