Novel Perovskite LEDs and Single Photon Sources

Energy use for lighting accounts for 5 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions from lighting could be significantly reduced if current solid-state lighting white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were replaced with LEDs that employed lead halide perovskite (LHP) semiconductors as light-emitting components. Within the past ten years, LHPs have been fabricated by various research labs worldwide into efficient LEDs that emit light in various colors (e.g., red, green, or blue). However, it has yet been challenging to combine the individual red-, green-, and blue-emitting components into one white LED, which is because red-, green- and blue-emitting LHPs are unstable and exchange ions when brought into contact with one another, for example, within a white-emissive thin film constituent of a white LED. The possibility of overcoming this limitation will be explored during this Erwin Schrödinger project. The objective is to develop and test a novel white LHP LED. Additionally, the potential of this LED to outperform the efficiency of current, commercially available solid-state lighting white LEDs will be investigated. Various strongly luminescing LHP compounds will be synthesized as part of this process. Moreover, they will be tested for their ability to emit single photons (i.e., single particles of light) for the first time. If the LHPs under study prove to be single photon sources, they could be utilized as easy- and cheap-to- synthesize components in future quantum communication applications.