Rare-Earth Free Self-Activated Graphene Quantum Dots and Copper-Cysteamine Phosphors for Enhanced White Light-Emitting-Diodes under Single Excitation

Rare-earth (RE) based phosphors are attractive due to their potential applications. However, owing to the resource issue, these kinds of phosphors are expensive and costly. On the contrary, as for phosphor-convert white light-emitting-diodes (pc-WLEDs), a solution-processed tunable warm white emission LED composite is fabricated in this study under single excitation, with both RE free phosphors graphene quantum dots (GQDs) and Copper-Cysteamine (Cu-Cy). By using microwave-assisted wet-chemical method and with graphite as raw material, cold white fluorescence of the GQDs is obtained. Cu-Cy which shows intense photoluminescence in the red region has the structure where both the thio and amine groups connected with copper and forming cysteamine. Warm white light is achieved by mixing the two self-activated RE free phosphors at the weight ratio of 1: 1.7 under the excitation at 365 nm. The designed optimal LED device has the properties of CIE (x, y) = (0.341, 0.327), T = 4436 K, R = 87.9 EQE = 0.31%. The experimental results demonstrate that RE free phosphor(s) excited under a single chip can open up a new avenue to develop much lower device for warm WLEDs.