Luminous Molecules

Chemists smooth the path for new and better light sources

13-Apr-2023 - Twisted molecules play an important role in the development of organic light-emitting diodes. A team of chemists has managed to create these compounds with exactly the three-dimensional structure that they wanted. In so doing, they are smoothing the path for new and better light sources. They ...

Nanoantennas directing a bright future: White LEDs may soon be dethroned

Titanium oxides found to significantly increase efficiency and photoluminescence

23-Dec-2022 - White LEDs may soon be dethroned as the world's go-to light source by an alternative with a much better sense of direction. As a next-generation optical control technology, aphotonic crystalornanoantennais a two-dimensional structure in which nano-sized particles are arranged periodically on ...

A sustainable path for energy-demanding photochemistry

Novel strategy for the generation of highly energetic UV light

05-Dec-2022 - Many photochemical processes rely on UV light from inefficient or toxic light sources that the LED technology cannot replace for technical reasons. An international team of scientists led by Professor Christoph Kerzig of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany and Professor Nobuhiro ...

‘Smart plastic’ material is step forward toward soft, flexible robotics and electronics

A new plastic-like material can be manipulated to be soft and stretchy or hard and rigid with only the application of a catalyst and visible light

21-Oct-2022 - Inspired by living things from trees to shellfish, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin set out to create a plastic much like many life forms that are hard and rigid in some places and soft and stretchy in others­. Their success — a first, using only light and a catalyst to change ...

Bright, stable, and easy to recycle lighting

Low-cost blue and white light emitting electrochemical cells developed

11-May-2022 - A low-cost and easy-to-manufacture lighting technology can be made with light-emitting electrochemical cells. Such cells are thin-film electronic and ionic devices that generate light after a low voltage is applied. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of ...

World’s first LED lights developed from rice husks

19-Apr-2022 - Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot (QD) LED light. Their ...

„Crazy“ light emitters

Unusual quantum phenomenon discovered

31-Jan-2022 - A highly unusual movement of light emitting particles in atomically-thin semiconductors was experimentally confirmed by scientists from the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat–Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter. Electronic quasiparticles, known as excitons, seemed to move in ...

Ultra-thin crystals as light sources in lasers

Laser emission demonstrated at room temperature: semiconductors consisting of three atomic layers could form the basis for innovative lasers

10-Nov-2021 - In an article published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, an international team led by Oldenburg physicists Dr. Hangyon Shan, Prof. Dr Christian Schneider and Dr. Carlos Anton-Solanas reports that crystals consisting of just three atomic layers can emit laser-like light at room ...

Put into the right light - Reproducible and sustainable coupling reactions

Improved methods for coupling reactions with light by targeted control of the catalyst activity

09-Jul-2020 - A team of researchers reports in the journal Nature Catalysis that sustainable carbon-nitrogen cross-couplings can be performed using simple nickel salts, carbon nitrides and light. The chemists study the use of cost-effective and reproducible semiconductors as photocatalysts in coupling ...

Lighting material of the future

Green luminescent substance is a hot candidate for producing OLEDs

07-May-2020 - At the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, researchers have gained insights into a promising material for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The substance enables high light yields and would be inexpensive to produce on a large scale - that means it is practically made for use in large-area room ...