Researchers develop full-color emitted up-conversion nanoparticle technology for ultra-advanced RGB display quality

Dr. Ho Seong Jang and colleagues from the Extreme Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed an up-conversion nanoparticle technology that introduces Core@Multi-Shell nanostructures.

This work is featured in Journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The luminescent material is uniquely lit and is used in a variety of display devices such as televisions, tablets, monitors, and smartphones to allow you to display a variety of images and videos. However, traditional two-dimensional flat displays cannot fully convey the three-dimensional dimensions of the real world, limiting the sense of depth.

The film “Avatar” attracted a lot of attention on 3D images, but audiences must wear special glasses to experience a sense of depth, and to solve this inconvenience, a 3D display without glasses was developed, but with the disadvantage of causing eye fatigue.

Three-dimensional volume display technology is being studied to solve these problems. This is a next-generation display technology that implements 3D image information in three-dimensional space, requiring up-conversion nanoparticles that absorb infrared rays and emit visible light.

In particular, up-conversion nanoparticles are required that can emit all three major colors from one nanoparticle: light red (R), green (g), and blue (b), but the brightness ranges in low color ranges, even if existing materials emit only one color from a single nanoparticle or r/g/b emissions are possible.

KIST researchers controlled the material composition of the core and shell to induce R/G/B emissions from a single nanoparticle, and applied near-infrared light of three wavelengths to generate R/G/B emissions at different excitation wavelengths.

In particular, they designed a core that emits green light, an inner shell, emits red light, and emits blue light, and achieves high color purity and strong luminescence intensity with r/g/b emission on a single nanoparticle.

The nanoparticles developed by researchers can achieve a wide range of colors by simultaneously applying near-infrared light of multiple wavelengths, achieving a wide range of colors, 94.2% of the NTSC color space and 133% of the SRGB color space.

The researchers also demonstrated the potential to use Uponversion nanoparticles to realize 3D volumetric displays by fabricating transparent upconversion nanoparticle polymer composites to display various color images.

“The full-color emission of upconversion nanoparticles that can absorb near-infrared light and produce high-color reproduction allows commercialization of 3D capacity displays and display true 3D images. These upconversion nanoparticles can be used not only as display fields but also as security materials to prevent people with disabilities and tension.