Full visible range covering InP/ZnS nanocrystals with high photometric performance and their application to white quantum dot light-emitting diodes.

lasers, [ 9–11 ] biomedical imaging, [ 12,13 ] and sensors. [ 14,15 ] Currently, CdSe NCs as the workhorse have been well developed for such uses. [ 16–32 ] Despite their apparent advantages (high emission quantum yields, narrow emission line width, good photostability, etc. [ 33–37 ] ), the intrinsic toxicity of CdSe NCs makes them environmentally restricted, which has thus cast a doubtful future for their practical applications. [ 38,39 ] Indium phosphide (band gap: 1.35 eV) is considered as the ideal alternative material, which offers a similar emission wavelength range but without intrinsic toxicity. [ 40–51 ] Previous studies have demonstrated that InP NCs can be well used in white LEDs for improving their CRI. For example, Nann et al. reported a solidstate white LED with a CRI value up to 86 by adding InP/ZnS NCs in green together with yellow phosphors. [ 52 ] Recently, a high quantum effi ciency (QE) of InP NCs of close to 70% was realized, [ 46 ] and electroluminescence (EL) emission from InP-based NCs was also reported. [ 53 ] However, there exist crucial problems related to the performance of these InP NCs. Among them are their color purity and emission spectrum tunability, which are much inferior to the well-developed CdSe NCs. The inferior properties of these InP NCs originate from a harsh reaction control owing to the strong coordinating strength of indium ligands. The emission linewidth of the typical InP NCs reported is wider (50–80 nm) than that of CdSe (15–40 nm), which leads to a worse color purity for InP as compared to CdSe. A pioneer work on the synthesis of the InP/ZnS NCs with tunable