Engineering triangular carbon quantum dots with unprecedented narrow bandwidth emission for multicolored LEDs

Carbon quantum dots (CQDs) have emerged as promising materials for optoelectronic applications on account of carbon’s intrinsic merits of high stability, low cost, and environment-friendliness. However, the CQDs usually give broad emission with full width at half maximum exceeding 80 nm, which fundamentally limit their display applications. Here we demonstrate multicolored narrow bandwidth emission (full width at half maximum of 30 nm) from triangular CQDs with a quantum yield up to 54–72%. Detailed structural and optical characterizations together with theoretical calculations reveal that the molecular purity and crystalline perfection of the triangular CQDs are key to the high color-purity. Moreover, multicolored light-emitting diodes based on these CQDs display good stability, high color-purity, and high-performance with maximum luminance of 1882–4762 cd m−2 and current efficiency of 1.22–5.11 cd A−1. This work will set the stage for developing next-generation high-performance CQDs-based light-emitting diodes.
Carbon quantum dots have promising advantages such as high stability, low cost and environment-friendliness, but their broad emission band limits their application in displays. Here Yuan et al. synthesize these dots showing tunable emission color, high fluorescence and a narrow FWHM of only 30 nanometers.