Ni2+-Doped Garnet Solid-Solution Phosphor-Converted Broadband Shortwave Infrared Light-Emitting Diodes toward Spectroscopy Application

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 4265 - 4275
• Main Authors: Yuan, Lifang, Jin, Yahong, Wu, Haoyi, Deng, Kaiyuan, Qu, Bingyan, Chen, Li, Hu, Yihua, Liu, Ru-Shi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 26.01.2022
• Subjects: emissions factor; Functional Inorganic Materials and Devices; occupations; prototypes; spectroscopy; broadband emission; SWIR LED; spectroscopy; Ni2; shortwave infrared
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c20084
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252

Broadband shortwave infrared (SWIR) light-emitting diodes (LEDs), capable of advancing the next-generation solid-state smart invisible lighting technology, have sparked tremendous interest and will launch ground-breaking spectroscopy and instrumental applications. Nevertheless, the device performance is still suppressed by the low quantum efficiency and limited emission bandwidth of the critical phosphor layer. Herein, we report a high-performance Ni2+-doped garnet solid-solution broadband SWIR emitter centered at ∼1450 nm with a large full-width at half-maximum of ∼300 nm, thereby fabricating, for the first time, a directly excited Ni2+-doped garnet solid-solution phosphor-converted broadband SWIR LED device. A synergetic enhancement strategy, adding a fluxing agent and a charge compensator simultaneously, is proposed to deliver a more than 20-fold increase of the SWIR emission intensity and nearly 2-fold improvement of the thermal quenching behavior. The site occupation and mechanism behind the synergetic enhancement strategy are elucidated by a combination of experimental study and theoretical calculation. A prototype of the SWIR LED with a radiation flux of 1.25 mW is fabricated and utilized as an invisible SWIR light source to demonstrate the SWIR spectroscopy applications. This work not only opens a window to explore novel broadband SWIR phosphors but also provides a synergetic strategy to remarkably improve the performance of artificial SWIR LED light sources.