A team of researchers, which included scientists from SLAC, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently explained a process that interferes with making quantum dots brighter - when attempting to increase the intensity of emitted light, heat is generated instead - reducing the dots’ light-producing efficiency. The results of this new work could have broad implications for developing future quantum and photonics technologies.
Image credit: Nature Communications/SLAC
In a QLED TV screen, dots absorb blue light and turn it into green or red. At the low energies where TV screens operate, this conversion of light from one color to another is virtually 100% efficient. But at the higher excitation energies required for brighter screens and other technologies, the efficiency drops sharply. Researchers theorized about why this happens, but no one had ever observed it at the atomic scale until now.