Surface ligand engineering renders tube-like perovskite nanocrystal composites with outstanding polar organic solvent-tolerance and strong emission

Abstract Despite intriguing physic-optical property of cesium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (CsPbX3 NCs), the practical application is primarily hindered by their intrinsic instability. In this work, tube-like perovskite nanocrystal composites (denoted PDVB@CsPbBr3@SiO2 NCCs) are prepared via capitalizing on polymer nanotube as a nanoreactor in conjunction with concurrent in-situ silica encapsulation. By engineering surface ligand of silanes, the resulting PDVB@CsPbBr3@SiO2 NCCs exhibit no obvious PL loss after continuous UV irradiation for 30 day, heating at 80 oC for 48 h, and exposure to ambient air (with a humidity > 75 %) for 60 day, which is superior to previous reports. Most importantly, PL intensity of PDVB@CsPbBr3@SiO2 NCCs is significantly enhanced after exposure to various polar organic solvents (POS) including MeOH, EtOH, IPA, DMF, THF and CHCl3, and kept strong emission after 30 day. Such dramatically improved stability of PDVB@CsPbBr3@SiO2 NCCs in POS may be attributed to the two-side protection from PDVB and SiO2 together with efficient surface passivation with solvent molecules as revealed by time-resolved PL measurement. In addition, using green emission of PDVB@CsPbBr3@SiO2 NCCs as color-converting component in liquid-crystal display (LCD) backlight film give rise to colorful and bright images with wide color gamut of 126.8%. This work represents a facile and robust strategy to craft polar organic solvent (POS)-tolerance perovskite nanocrystal composites with high emission, which shows grand promising in various catalysis reactions and optoelectronic devices.