A research team led by Professor YANG Xinyi from the College of Physics at Jilin University (JLU) recently achieved efficient white-light emission in sulfur dots for the first time.

The findings, titled Towards Efficient White-light Emission in Sulfur Dots through Surface Charge Engineering, were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition on Sept 25.

Controlling the photoluminescence of sulfur dots has long been a challenge due to the intrinsic bandgap of sulfur. To address this, the team developed a novel strategy to tune the surface electronic structure of sulfur dots through ligand modification.

This approach created charge transfer excited states with structural sensitivity, allowing for precise control over the fluorescence color. As a result, the team successfully synthesized sulfur dots that emit broadband white fluorescence, with full-width at half maximum of 187 nanometers.

The study showed that the down-conversion LED devices based on the white-light sulfur dots exhibited excellent chromatic stability and operational stability. This research provides new insights into designing high-performance, tunable-emission sulfur dots.

The first author of this paper is WANG Weibin, a doctoral student at the State Key Laboratory of Superhard Materials, College of Physics. The corresponding authors are Professors YANG Xinyi, SUI Yongming, and ZOU Bo, all from the same lab.