Solid-state highly photoluminescent quantum dot (QD)-based phosphors attract great scientific interests as color converters because of an increasing demand for white-light-emitting devices. Herein, a microwave-assisted heating method is presented to fabricate multicolor QD-based phosphors within 30 s through microwave-assisted heating of the mixture of QDs and sodium silicate aqueous solution. In the composites, the formed cross-linked networks not only play as a matrix to prevent QD aggregation in solid state but also cause the variation of the refractive index around QDs and the QD surface optimization, which contributes to good stabilities and twice enhancement in photoluminescence quantum yields (69%) compared with the initial QD aqueous solution (33%). Using the QD-based phosphors as color conversion layers, white-light-emitting diodes were realized with controllable color temperature, high color purity, and high color-rendering index (90.3), which show a great potential in display and illumination. Furthermore, the luminescence lifetime of the QD-based phosphors is less than 25 ns. The potential application of the QD-based phosphors in visible light communication was also demonstrated, with the modulation bandwidth achieving 42 MHz.
Keywords: aqueous quantum dot; phosphors; sodium silicate; visible light communication; white-light-emitting diode.