White light generation by resonant nonradiative energy transfer from epitaxial InGaN/GaN quantum wells to colloidal CdSe/ZnS core/shell quantum dots

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate white-light-generating nonradiative energy transfer (ET) from epitaxial quantum wells (QWs) to colloidal quantum dots (QDs) in their close proximity. This proof-of-concept hybrid color-converting system consists of chemically synthesized red-emitting CdSe/ZnS core/shell heteronanocrystals intimately integrated on epitaxially grown cyan-emitting InGaN/GaN QWs. The white light is generated by the collective luminescence of QWs and QDs, for which the dot emission is further increased by 63% with nonradiative ET, setting the operating point in the white region of CIE chromaticity diagram. Using cyan emission at 490 nm from the QWs and red emission at 650 nm from the nanocrystal (NC) luminophors, we obtain warm white light generation with a correlated color temperature of Tc = 3135 K and tristimulus coordinates of (x,y) = (0.42, 0.39) in the white region. By analyzing the time-resolved radiative decay of these NC emitters in our hybrid system with a 16 ps time resolution, the luminescence kinetics reveals a fast ET with a rate of (2 ns)-1 using a multiexponential fit with χ 2 = 1.0171.