Facile Microwave Synthesis of Efficient Green Emissive Carbon Dots Powder and Their Application in Visible Light Communication and White Light Emitting Devices

Abstract Highly green emissive solid‐state carbon dots (CDs) with photoluminescence quantum efficiency of 58% are prepared through a rapid microwave assisted heating method. Due to the spatial confinement from the biuret crystal matrix, aggregation among CDs is effectively suppressed, thus allowing the CDs to give efficient emission in the solid‐state. The CDs show excitation independent emission and mono‐exponential decay characteristics with a nearly constant lifetime of ≈13 ns upon varying the detected emissions, indicating the presence of a single type of emissive state in the CDs. Due to their high quantum efficiency and short lifetime, the obtained CDs are applied as the color conversion layer of a near‐ultraviolet micro light‐emitting diode (µLED) chip (405 nm) for visible light communication, achieving a modulation bandwidth of 165 MHz, which is much higher than the bandwidth of the conventional combination of Ce 3+ ‐doped yttrium aluminum garnet phosphor with GaN LED. Moreover, the green emitting solid‐state CDs are applied to fabricate a prototype white LED device, which exhibits good lighting suitability with a color rendering index of 90.6 and a Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage chromaticity coordinates of (0.327, 0.332).