Management of electroluminescence from silver-doped colloidal quantum well light-emitting diodes

Impurity doping is a promising strategy to afford colloidal nanocrystals exhibiting novel optical, catalytic, and electronic characteristics. However, some significant properties of noble metal-doped nanocrystals (NMD-NCs) remain unknown. Here, we report the electroluminescence (EL) from NMD-NCs. By doping silver impurity into cadmium selenide colloidal quantum wells (CQWs), dual-emission emitters are achieved and a light-emitting diode (LED) with a luminance of 1,339 cd m−2 is reported. In addition, the proposed energy gap engineering to manage exciton recombination is a feasible scheme for tunable EL emissions (e.g., the dopant emission is tuned from 606 to 761 nm). Furthermore, an organic-inorganic hybrid white LED based on CQWs is realized, reaching a color rendering index of 82. Moreover, flexible CQW-LEDs are reported. The findings present a step to unveil the EL property of NMD-NCs, which can be extended to other noble metal impurities, and pave the pathway for NMD-NCs as a class of electronic materials for EL applications.