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Temporal full-colour tuning through non-steady-state upconversion

Nature Nanotechnology volume 10, pages 237–242 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Developing light-harvesting materials with tunable emission colours has always been at the forefront of colour display technologies1,2,3. The variation in materials composition, phase and structure can provide a useful tool for producing a wide range of emission colours, but controlling the colour gamut in a material with a fixed composition remains a daunting challenge4,5. Here, we demonstrate a convenient, versatile approach to dynamically fine-tuning emission in the full colour range from a new class of core–shell upconversion nanocrystals by adjusting the pulse width of infrared laser beams. Our mechanistic investigations suggest that the unprecedented colour tunability from these nanocrystals is governed by a non-steady-state upconversion process. These findings provide keen insights into controlling energy transfer in out-of-equilibrium optical processes, while offering the possibility for the construction of true three-dimensional, full-colour display systems with high spatial resolution and locally addressable colour gamut.

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Figure 1: Temporal multicolour tuning in NaYF4-based core–shell nanocrystals.
Figure 2: Schematic representation detailing the non-steady-state upconversion mechanisms.
Figure 3: Time-dependent and power-dependent measurement of colour-tunable core–shell nanocrystals.
Figure 4: Demonstration of full-colour volumetric three-dimensional display in nanocrystal/PDMS composite materials.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education (grant no. MOE2010-T2-1-083), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR; grant no. 1231AFG028), the National Research Foundation and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, Fundamental Studies of Perovskite Solar Cells (2015CB932200), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 51173081, 61136003). M.H. acknowledges the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore, for financial support under the Competitive Research Program (CRP award no. NRF-CRP10-2012-04).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Renren Deng & Xiaogang Liu

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117583, Singapore

    Fei Qin & Minghui Hong

  3. Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays & Institute of Advanced Materials, Jiangsu National Synergistic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Nanjing University of Posts & Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Runfeng Chen & Wei Huang

  4. Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics & Institute of Advanced Materials, Jiangsu National Synergistic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, China

    Wei Huang

  5. Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, 117602, Singapore

    Xiaogang Liu

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  1. Renren Deng
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Contributions

R.D. and X.L. conceived the projects with contributions from W.H. and M.H. R.D. and F.Q. were primarily responsible for the experiments. R.C. contributed to numerical simulations. M.H. and W.H. provided input into the design of the experiments. R.D. and X.L. wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wei Huang, Minghui Hong or Xiaogang Liu.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Deng, R., Qin, F., Chen, R. et al. Temporal full-colour tuning through non-steady-state upconversion. Nature Nanotech 10, 237–242 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.317

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