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Mini-LED backlights, combining color conversion materials with blue mini-LED chips, promise traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with higher luminance, better contrast, and a wider color gamut. However, as color conversion materials, quantum dots (QDs) are toxic and unstable, whereas commercially available inorganic phosphors are too big in size to combine with small mini-LED chips and also have strong size-dependence of quantum efficiency (QE) and reliability. In this work, we prepare fine-grained Sr2Si5N8:Eu2+-based red phosphors with high efficiency and stability by treating commercially available phosphors with ball milling, centrifuging, and acid washing. The particle size of phosphors can be easily controlled by milling speed, and the phosphors with a size varying from 3.5 to 0.7 μm are thus obtained. The samples remain the same QE as the original ones (~80%) even when their particle size is reduced to 3.2–3.5 μm, because they contain fewer surface suspension bond defects. More importantly, SrBaSi5N8:Eu2+ phosphors show a size-independent thermal quenching behavior and a zero thermal degradation. We demonstrate that red-emitting mini-LEDs can be fabricated by combining the SrBaSi5N8:Eu2+ red phosphor (3.5 μm in size) with blue mini-LED chips, which show a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of above 31% and a super-high luminance of 34.3 Mnits. It indicates that fine and high efficiency phosphors can be obtained by the proposed method in this work, and they have great potentials for use in mini-LED displays.


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Fine-grained phosphors for red-emitting mini-LEDs with high efficiency and super-luminance

Show Author's information Yu KANGaShuxing LIb( )Rundong TIANbGuangzhu LIUa( )Haorui DONGbTianliang ZHOUbRong-Jun XIEb,c( )
College of Materials Science and Engineering, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin 123000, China
Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Surface and Interface Engineering for High Performance Materials, College of Materials, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China
State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China

Abstract

Mini-LED backlights, combining color conversion materials with blue mini-LED chips, promise traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with higher luminance, better contrast, and a wider color gamut. However, as color conversion materials, quantum dots (QDs) are toxic and unstable, whereas commercially available inorganic phosphors are too big in size to combine with small mini-LED chips and also have strong size-dependence of quantum efficiency (QE) and reliability. In this work, we prepare fine-grained Sr2Si5N8:Eu2+-based red phosphors with high efficiency and stability by treating commercially available phosphors with ball milling, centrifuging, and acid washing. The particle size of phosphors can be easily controlled by milling speed, and the phosphors with a size varying from 3.5 to 0.7 μm are thus obtained. The samples remain the same QE as the original ones (~80%) even when their particle size is reduced to 3.2–3.5 μm, because they contain fewer surface suspension bond defects. More importantly, SrBaSi5N8:Eu2+ phosphors show a size-independent thermal quenching behavior and a zero thermal degradation. We demonstrate that red-emitting mini-LEDs can be fabricated by combining the SrBaSi5N8:Eu2+ red phosphor (3.5 μm in size) with blue mini-LED chips, which show a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of above 31% and a super-high luminance of 34.3 Mnits. It indicates that fine and high efficiency phosphors can be obtained by the proposed method in this work, and they have great potentials for use in mini-LED displays.

Keywords: particle size, Sr2Si5N8:Eu2+-based phosphors, external quantum efficiency (EQE), thermal degradation, mini-LED

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Received: 06 April 2022
Revised: 18 May 2022
Accepted: 25 May 2022
Published: 05 September 2022
Issue date: September 2022

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© The Author(s) 2022.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51832005 and 52172157), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 20720200075), and Fujian Provincial Science and Technology Project (Nos. 2020I0002 and 2021J01042).

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