Team Uses Plasmonics to Improve QD LED Efficiency

Researchers have designed metallic nanostructure substrates that can lower production cost while improving the efficiency of quantum dot (QD) LEDs. For its design, the team exploited the phenomenon of so-called surface plasmonic resonances that can occur when nanoscale metallic structures are exposed to light. To enhance the fluorescence intensity of the QD LEDs, the team from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) used different metallic nanostructures for each QD LED. Silver nanodisks were used for red QDs and aluminum nanodisks for green QDs. The team used systematic finite-difference time domain simulations of excitation, spontaneous emission and quantum efficiency enhancement to design the nanodisk arrays.