Japan-based material developer Green Science Alliance developed a new composite material made from a combination of graphene quantum dots and silica, useful to create white LEDs from blue LEDs (440-470 nm).

The company says that this is the first adoption of such a material for LED applications. The company says the adoption of the QD and Silica offers superior performance to the currently-used phosphor as the QDs do not suffer from light scattering, and the white LED is more efficient. The material is also not expensive as the graphene QDs can be produced on the cheap. GS Alliance believes the new white LED will be cheaper than current white LEDs on the market.
 

A new study by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Delaware, Baltimore County, in a collaborative project through the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois, used ultrafast nanometric imaging and found good and bad emitters among populations of carbon dots. This observation suggests that by selecting only super-emitters, carbon nanodots can be purified to replace toxic metal quantum dots in many applications, according to the researchers.

“Coming into this study, we did not know if all carbon dots are only mediocre emitters or if some were perfect and others were bad,” said Illinois chemistry professor Martin Gruebele, who led the study. “We knew that if we could show that there are good ones and bad ones, maybe we could eventually find a way to pick the perfect ones out of the mix.”