Highly Efficient, Color-Pure, Color-Stable Blue Quantum Dot Light-Emitting Devices

For colloidal quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QD-LEDs), blue emissive device has always been inferior to green and red counterparts with respect to device efficiency, primarily because blue QDs possess inherently unfavorable energy levels relative to green and red ones, rendering hole injection to blue QDs from neighboring hole transport layer (HTL) inefficient. Herein, unprecedented synthesis of blue CdZnS/ZnS core/shell QDs that exhibit an exceptional photoluminescence (PL) quantum yield of 98%, extraordinarily large size of 11.5 nm with a shell thickness of 2.6 nm, and high stability against a repeated purification process is reported. All-solution-processed, multilayered blue QD-LEDs, consisting of an HTL of poly(9-vinlycarbazole), emissive layer of CdZnS/ZnS QDs, and electron transport layer of ZnO nanoparticles, are fabricated. Our best device displays not only a maximum luminance of 2624 cd/m², luminous efficiency of 2.2 cd/A, and external quantum efficiency of 7.1%, but also no red-shift and broadening in electroluminescence (EL) spectra with increasing voltage as well as a spectral match between PL and EL.