Surface state engineering to achieve white LEDs with carbon nanomaterials

White-light-emitting diodes (W-LEDs) have many advantages over forms of lighting – incandescent, fluorescent and halogen – and this solid-state lighting technique is bound to make major inroads into the commercial and household markets. Conventional W-LED fabrication uses phosphors, which depend on scarce and expensive rare earths, or in a more recently developed technique, on quantum dots. Unfortunately, the toxicity of the elements used for efficient quantum dot based LEDs – CdS, CdSe, and their Pb containing counterparts – is a severe drawback for many applications.