Color tunable light-emitting diodes based on copper doped semiconducting nanocrystals

We have introduced copper-doped semiconducting nanocrystals in light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Characteristics of the devices show that electroluminescence (EL) emission in these LEDs is color tunable. In copper-doped ZnS nanocrystals in the core and Zn1-xCdxS host as a shell-layer, photoluminescence (PL) arises from a transition from conduction band-edge of the host to 3d-levels of copper-ions. The PL of the nanocrystals and hence the EL of LEDs based on such nanostructures become tunable by varying the Cd-content in Zn-Cd-S alloys, that is, Zn1-xCdxS with different values of x, which changes the conduction band-edge of the host. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3626855]