Self-Assembled Copper Nanoclusters-Based White Light Emitting Diodes With High Performance

Metal nanoclusters, composed of a few to a hundred atoms, whose size is close to the Fermi wavelength of electrons, have become a new type of phosphor materials due to their unique electronic structure and excellent performance. And metal nanoclusters have been applied in various applications, such as bioimaging, chemical biosensing, optoelectronic devices, etc. At present, researchers have synthesized and studied gold nanoclusters and silver nanoclusters, but Au and Ag nanoclusters have one drawback: expensive. At the same time, copper nanoclusters have attracted people's attention because of their non-toxicity, large Stokes shift and economy. In this paper, we fabricated 1-dodecanethiol (DT)-capped self-assembled copper nanoclusters in colloidal solution with yellow light emission and characterized the prepared self-assembled copper nanoclusters by UV–visible spectra, TEM and PL characterization methods. Self-assembled copper nanoclusters were used as color conversion layers for the manufacture of white light-emitting diodes. The prepared white LED has good color properties, the color rendering index was 79.3, the CIE color coordinates located at (0.3213,0.3255) and the color temperature was 6067K. This indicates that copper nanoclusters show potential for applications in white lighting emitting diodes as a new type of low-cost and superior photoluminescent material candidates.