SYNTHESIS AND APPLICATIONS OF CORE SHELL QUANTUM DOTS FOR WHITE LIGHT EMITTIING DIODES.

ORIGIN OF RESEARCH PROPOSAL: A significant amount of current research is aimed at using the unique optical properties of Quantum (Q) dots in devices, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), solar cells and biological markers. In order to combat global warming, there has recently been a lot of effort directed towards finding new ways to save electrical energy. Since 20% of domestic energy consumption is used for lighting, so it is important to make lighting technology more efficient. More and more research is being focused on the development of eco-friendly lighting devices. Solid-state lighting devices, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), are a promising alternative to incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lamps, as they offer higher efficacy, lower power consumption, longer lifetime, and a faster response time. In case of hybrid light-emitting devices, to obtain white light, all the three primary colours (red, green, and blue) have to be produced simultaneously. White light solid state lighting (SSL) LEDs are expected to reduce worldwide electricity consumption by ~ 50% and total consumption of electricity by more than 10%. The white LEDs (WLEDs) are excellent candidates for general lightening because of their rapidly improving efficiency, durability, and reliability and their environment friendly constituents. Another important white light source is SSL based on the inorganic phosphor. These methods possess multiple advantages such as simple synthesis, high yield, good stability, and does not disturb the chromaticity. Different structures of white light emitting SS-LEDs that have been reported so far include multi-chip white light LEDs, monolithic white light LEDs and colour-conversion white light LEDs based on phosphor coatings. Many strategies have been reported to realize white emission in organic LEDs, these include blending emissive polymers with different emission colour, doping with phosphorescent complexes or fluorescent dyes into a small molecule or polymer host, multiple component emissive layers containing an appropriate ratio of red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphorescent or fluorescent dopants. Further in case of WLEDs the general approach is to use additive colour mixing, where the emission from differently coloured light sources combine to form white light. The RGB LEDs use red, green, and blue LEDs whereas down conversion LEDs use only one blue LED chip with an additional polymer layer containing yellow emitting converter material. Hence blue light is down converted to light of longer wavelength, and the combination of blue and yellow lights is interpreted as white light by the human eye. However the commercially available white LEDs emit bluish, cold white light with poor colour rendering properties. The poor quality of the white light is due to yellow converter material, YAG: Ce (Y 2.94Al5O12Ce0.06). Another idea

involves mixing the emission from red, green and blue phosphors with a UV LED chip used for excitation. The disadvantage of such a device is low efficiency of red phosphor, due to large stroke shifts and the need for complex coating technology. Furthermore, mixing powders and finding high-efficiency compounds are more difficult for this device. However, there are several benefits, including high color rendering index, high luminous efficiency, and stable light color that are almost independent of the changed current. Another bright idea is to mix different sizes of quantum dot to increase spectral width across the visible region and so get perfect white. However a serious drawback arises from overlap of absorption and emission bands. This causes serious re-absorption at finite concentration, which in turn moves the emission further to the red. Also it was reported that simply capped QD were unstable when illuminated with UV light, as force between QD and capping agents are generally weak.