Tag Archives: Oleksandr Voznyy

Blue quantum dots and your television screen

Scientists used equipment at the Canadian Light Source (CLS; synchrotron in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) in the quest for better glowing dots on your television (maybe computers and telephones, too?) screen. From an August 20, 2020 news item on Nanowerk,

There are many things quantum dots could do, but the most obvious place they could change our lives is to make the colours on our TVs and screens more pristine. Research using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan is helping to bring this technology closer to our living rooms.

An August 19, 2020 CLS news release (also received via email) by Victoria Martinez, which originated the news item, explains what quantum dots are and fills in with technical details about this research,

Quantum dots are nanocrystals that glow, a property that scientists have been working with to develop next-generation LEDs. When a quantum dot glows, it creates very pure light in a precise wavelength of red, blue or green. Conventional LEDs, found in our TV screens today, produce white light that is filtered to achieve desired colours, a process that leads to less bright and muddier colours.

Until now, blue-glowing quantum dots, which are crucial for creating a full range of colour, have proved particularly challenging for researchers to develop. However, University of Toronto (U of T) researcher Dr. Yitong Dong and collaborators have made a huge leap in blue quantum dot fluorescence, results they recently published in Nature Nanotechnology.

“The idea is that if you have a blue LED, you have everything. We can always down convert the light from blue to green and red,” says Dong. “Let’s say you have green, then you cannot use this lower-energy light to make blue.”

The team’s breakthrough has led to quantum dots that produce green light at an external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 22% and blue at 12.3%. The theoretical maximum efficiency is not far off at 25%, and this is the first blue perovskite LED reported as achieving an EQE higher than 10%.

The Science

Dong has been working in the field of quantum dots for two years in Dr. Edward Sargent’s research group at the U of T. This astonishing increase in efficiency took time, an unusual production approach, and overcoming several scientific hurdles to achieve.

CLS techniques, particularly GIWAXS [grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering] on the HXMA beamline [hard X-ray micro-analysis (HXMA)], allowed the researchers to verify the structures achieved in their quantum dot films. This validated their results and helped clarify what the structural changes achieve in terms of LED performance.

“The CLS was very helpful. GIWAXS is a fascinating technique,” says Dong.

The first challenge was uniformity, important to ensuring a clear blue colour and to prevent the LED from moving towards producing green light.

“We used a special synthetic approach to achieve a very uniform assembly, so every single particle has the same size and shape. The overall film is nearly perfect and maintains the blue emission conditions all the way through,” says Dong.

Next, the team needed to tackle the charge injection needed to excite the dots into luminescence. Since the crystals are not very stable, they need stabilizing molecules to act as scaffolding and support them. These are typically long molecule chains, with up to 18 carbon-non-conductive molecules at the surface, making it hard to get the energy to produce light.

“We used a special surface structure to stabilize the quantum dot. Compared to the films made with long chain molecules capped quantum dots, our film has 100 times higher conductivity, sometimes even 1000 times higher.”

This remarkable performance is a key benchmark in bringing these nanocrystal LEDs to market. However, stability remains an issue and quantum dot LEDs suffer from short lifetimes. Dong is excited about the potential for the field and adds, “I like photons, these are interesting materials, and, well, these glowing crystals are just beautiful.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Bipolar-shell resurfacing for blue LEDs based on strongly confined perovskite quantum dots by Yitong Dong, Ya-Kun Wang, Fanglong Yuan, Andrew Johnston, Yuan Liu, Dongxin Ma, Min-Jae Choi, Bin Chen, Mahshid Chekini, Se-Woong Baek, Laxmi Kishore Sagar, James Fan, Yi Hou, Mingjian Wu, Seungjin Lee, Bin Sun, Sjoerd Hoogland, Rafael Quintero-Bermudez, Hinako Ebe, Petar Todorovic, Filip Dinic, Peicheng Li, Hao Ting Kung, Makhsud I. Saidaminov, Eugenia Kumacheva, Erdmann Spiecker, Liang-Sheng Liao, Oleksandr Voznyy, Zheng-Hong Lu, Edward H. Sargent. Nature Nanotechnology volume 15, pages668–674(2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0714-5 Published: 06 July 2020 Issue Date: August 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

If you search “Edward Sargent,” he’s the last author listed in the citation, here on this blog, you will find a number of postings that feature work from his laboratory at the University of Toronto.

Split some water molecules and save solar and wind (energy) for a future day

Professor Ted Sargent’s research team at the University of Toronto has a developed a new technique for saving the energy harvested by sun and wind farms according to a March 28, 2016 news item on Nanotechnology Now,

We can’t control when the wind blows and when the sun shines, so finding efficient ways to store energy from alternative sources remains an urgent research problem. Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering may have a solution inspired by nature.

The team has designed the most efficient catalyst for storing energy in chemical form, by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, just like plants do during photosynthesis. Oxygen is released harmlessly into the atmosphere, and hydrogen, as H2, can be converted back into energy using hydrogen fuel cells.

Discovering a better way of storing energy from solar and wind farms is “one of the grand challenges in this field,” Ted Sargent says (photo above by Megan Rosenbloom via flickr) Courtesy: University of Toronto

Discovering a better way of storing energy from solar and wind farms is “one of the grand challenges in this field,” Ted Sargent says (photo above by Megan Rosenbloom via flickr) Courtesy: University of Toronto

A March 24, 2016 University of Toronto news release by Marit Mitchell, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“Today on a solar farm or a wind farm, storage is typically provided with batteries. But batteries are expensive, and can typically only store a fixed amount of energy,” says Sargent. “That’s why discovering a more efficient and highly scalable means of storing energy generated by renewables is one of the grand challenges in this field.”

You may have seen the popular high-school science demonstration where the teacher splits water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, by running electricity through it. Today this requires so much electrical input that it’s impractical to store energy this way — too great proportion of the energy generated is lost in the process of storing it.

This new catalyst facilitates the oxygen-evolution portion of the chemical reaction, making the conversion from H2O into O2 and H2 more energy-efficient than ever before. The intrinsic efficiency of the new catalyst material is over three times more efficient than the best state-of-the-art catalyst.

Details are offered in the news release,

The new catalyst is made of abundant and low-cost metals tungsten, iron and cobalt, which are much less expensive than state-of-the-art catalysts based on precious metals. It showed no signs of degradation over more than 500 hours of continuous activity, unlike other efficient but short-lived catalysts. …

“With the aid of theoretical predictions, we became convinced that including tungsten could lead to a better oxygen-evolving catalyst. Unfortunately, prior work did not show how to mix tungsten homogeneously with the active metals such as iron and cobalt,” says one of the study’s lead authors, Dr. Bo Zhang … .

“We invented a new way to distribute the catalyst homogenously in a gel, and as a result built a device that works incredibly efficiently and robustly.”

This research united engineers, chemists, materials scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists across three countries. A chief partner in this joint theoretical-experimental studies was a leading team of theorists at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory under the leadership of Dr. Aleksandra Vojvodic. The international collaboration included researchers at East China University of Science & Technology, Tianjin University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Canadian Light Source and the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility.

“The team developed a new materials synthesis strategy to mix multiple metals homogeneously — thereby overcoming the propensity of multi-metal mixtures to separate into distinct phases,” said Jeffrey C. Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This work impressively highlights the power of tightly coupled computational materials science with advanced experimental techniques, and sets a high bar for such a combined approach. It opens new avenues to speed progress in efficient materials for energy conversion and storage.”

“This work demonstrates the utility of using theory to guide the development of improved water-oxidation catalysts for further advances in the field of solar fuels,” said Gary Brudvig, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University and director of the Yale Energy Sciences Institute.

“The intensive research by the Sargent group in the University of Toronto led to the discovery of oxy-hydroxide materials that exhibit electrochemically induced oxygen evolution at the lowest overpotential and show no degradation,” said University Professor Gabor A. Somorjai of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader in this field. “The authors should be complimented on the combined experimental and theoretical studies that led to this very important finding.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Homogeneously dispersed, multimetal oxygen-evolving catalysts by Bo Zhang, Xueli Zheng, Oleksandr Voznyy, Riccardo Comin, Michal Bajdich, Max García-Melchor, Lili Han, Jixian Xu, Min Liu, Lirong Zheng, F. Pelayo García de Arquer, Cao Thang Dinh, Fengjia Fan, Mingjian Yuan, Emre Yassitepe, Ning Chen, Tom Regier, Pengfei Liu, Yuhang Li, Phil De Luna, Alyf Janmohamed, Huolin L. Xin, Huagui Yang, Aleksandra Vojvodic, Edward H. Sargent. Science  24 Mar 2016: DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf1525

This paper is behind a paywall.

University of Toronto researchers combine 2 different materials for new hyper-efficient, light-emitting, hybrid crystal

The Sargent Group at the University of Toronto has been quite active with regard to LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and with quantum dots. Their latest work is announced in a July 16, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now (Note: I had to include the ‘oatmeal cookie and chocolate chips’ analogy in the first paragraph as it’s referred to subsequently),

It’s snack time: you have a plain oatmeal cookie, and a pile of chocolate chips. Both are delicious on their own, but if you can find a way to combine them smoothly, you get the best of both worlds.

Researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering [University of Toronto] used this insight to invent something totally new: they’ve combined two promising solar cell materials together for the first time, creating a new platform for LED technology.

The team designed a way to embed strongly luminescent nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots (the chocolate chips) into perovskite (the oatmeal cookie). Perovskites are a family of materials that can be easily manufactured from solution, and that allow electrons to move swiftly through them with minimal loss or capture by defects.

A July 15, 2015 University of Toronto news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, reveals more about the research (Note: A link has been removed),

“It’s a pretty novel idea to blend together these two optoelectronic materials, both of which are gaining a lot of traction,” says Xiwen Gong, one of the study’s lead authors and a PhD candidate working with Professor Ted Sargent. “We wanted to take advantage of the benefits of both by combining them seamlessly in a solid-state matrix.”

The result is a black crystal that relies on the perovskite matrix to ‘funnel’ electrons into the quantum dots, which are extremely efficient at converting electricity to light. Hyper-efficient LED technologies could enable applications from the visible-light LED bulbs in every home, to new displays, to gesture recognition using near-infrared wavelengths.

“When you try to jam two different crystals together, they often form separate phases without blending smoothly into each other,” says Dr. Riccardo Comin, a post-doctoral fellow in the Sargent Group. “We had to design a new strategy to convince these two components to forget about their differences and to rather intermix into forming a unique crystalline entity.”

The main challenge was making the orientation of the two crystal structures line up, called heteroexpitaxy. To achieve heteroepitaxy, Gong, Comin and their team engineered a way to connect the atomic ‘ends’ of the two crystalline structures so that they aligned smoothly, without defects forming at the seams. “We started by building a nano-scale scaffolding ‘shell’ around the quantum dots in solution, then grew the perovskite crystal around that shell so the two faces aligned,” explained coauthor Dr. Zhijun Ning, who contributed to the work while a post-doctoral fellow at UofT and is now a faculty member at ShanghaiTech.

The resulting heterogeneous material is the basis for a new family of highly energy-efficient near-infrared LEDs. Infrared LEDs can be harnessed for improved night-vision technology, to better biomedical imaging, to high-speed telecommunications.

Combining the two materials in this way also solves the problem of self-absorption, which occurs when a substance partly re-absorbs the same spectrum of energy that it emits, with a net efficiency loss. “These dots in perovskite don’t suffer reabsorption, because the emission of the dots doesn’t overlap with the absorption spectrum of the perovskite,” explains Comin.

Gong, Comin and the team deliberately designed their material to be compatible with solution-processing, so it could be readily integrated with the most inexpensive and commercially practical ways of manufacturing solar film and devices. Their next step is to build and test the hardware to capitalize on the concept they have proven with this work.

“We’re going to build the LED device and try to beat the record power efficiency reported in the literature,” says Gong.

I see that Sargent’s work is still associated with and supported by Saudi Arabia, from the news release,

This work was supported by the Ontario Research Fund Research Excellence Program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST).

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Quantum-dot-in-perovskite solids by Zhijun Ning, Xiwen Gong, Riccardo Comin, Grant Walters, Fengjia Fan, Oleksandr Voznyy, Emre Yassitepe, Andrei Buin, Sjoerd Hoogland, & Edward H. Sargent. Nature 523, 324–328 (16 July 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14563 Published online 15 July 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.

Finally, the researchers have made a .gif of their hybrid crystal available.

A glowing quantum dot seamlessly integrated into a perovskite crystal matrix (Image: Ella Marushchenko). Courtesy: University of Toronto

A glowing quantum dot seamlessly integrated into a perovskite crystal matrix (Image: Ella Marushchenko). Courtesy: University of Toronto

ETA July 17, 2015:

Dexter Johnson provides some additional insight into the work in his July 16, 2015 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers website), Note:  Links have been removed,

Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto has built a reputation over the years as being a prominent advocate for the use of quantum dots in photovoltaics. Sargent has even penned a piece for IEEE Spectrum covering the topic, and this blog has covered his record breaking efforts at boosting the conversion efficiency of quantum dot-based photovoltaics a few times.

Earlier this year, however, Sargent started to take an interest in the hot material that has the photovoltaics community buzzing: perovskite. …

Spray-on solar cells from the University of Toronto (Canada)

It’s been a while since there’s been a solar cell story from the University of Toronto (U of T) and I was starting to wonder if Ted (Edward) Sargent had moved to another educational institution. The drought has ended with the announcement of three research papers being published by researchers from Sargent’s U of T laboratory. From a Dec. 5, 2014 ScienceDaily news item,

Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.

That’s Illan Kramer’s … hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) — a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

A Dec. 4, 2014 University of Toronto news release (also on EurekAlert) by Marit Mitchell, which originated the news item, gives a bit more detail about the technology (Note: Links have been removed),

 Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly-shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. A surface the size of a car roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-watt light bulbs – or 24 compact fluorescents.

He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.

Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing – an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.

Kramer built his sprayLD device using parts that are readily available and rather affordable – he sourced a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store.

“This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it,” says Kramer. “We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.”

“As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it’s important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable,” said Professor Ted Sargent, vice-dean, research in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at University of Toronto and Kramer’s supervisor. “We were thrilled when this attractively-manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity.”

In a third paper in the journal ACS Nano, Kramer and his colleagues used IBM’s BlueGeneQ supercomputer to model how and why the sprayed CQDs perform just as well as – and in some cases better than – their batch-processed counterparts. This work was supported by the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, and by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

For those who would like to see the sprayLD device,

Here are links and citation for all three papers,

Efficient Spray-Coated Colloidal Quantum Dot Solar Cells by Illan J. Kramer, James C. Minor, Gabriel Moreno-Bautista, Lisa Rollny, Pongsakorn Kanjanaboos, Damir Kopilovic, Susanna M. Thon, Graham H. Carey, Kang Wei Chou, David Zhitomirsky, Aram Amassian, and Edward H. Sargent. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201403281 Article first published online: 10 NOV 2014

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Colloidal quantum dot solar cells on curved and flexible substrates by Illan J. Kramer, Gabriel Moreno-Bautista, James C. Minor, Damir Kopilovic, and Edward H. Sargent. Appl. Phys. Lett. 105, 163902 (2014); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4898635 Published online 21 October 2014

© 2014 AIP Publishing LLC

Electronically Active Impurities in Colloidal Quantum Dot Solids by Graham H. Carey, Illan J. Kramer, Pongsakorn Kanjanaboos, Gabriel Moreno-Bautista, Oleksandr Voznyy, Lisa Rollny, Joel A. Tang, Sjoerd Hoogland, and Edward H. Sargent. ACS Nano, 2014, 8 (11), pp 11763–11769 DOI: 10.1021/nn505343e Publication Date (Web): November 6, 2014

Copyright © 2014 American Chemical Society

All three papers are behind paywalls.

Given the publication dates for the papers, this looks like an attempt to get some previously announced research noticed by sending out a summary news release using a new ‘hook’ to get attention. I hope it works for them as it must be disheartening to have your research sink into obscurity because the announcements were issued during one or more busy news cycles.

One final note, if I understand the news release correctly, this work is still largely theoretical as there don’t seem to have been any field tests.