Perovskite Photonics

Today's solid-state-lighting is based on devices that convert blue light to other colours using a phosphor.

This is an inefficient approach for generation of white light. Alternatively, devices that directly emit red, blue and green light can be combined together to make white light emitters. However, currently there are no efficient green light emitters available for this approach to be viable.

Recently, perovskites have emerged as a promising class of material for light emitters. The bandgap or the material property that determines the colour of emitted light for perovskites can easily be tuned over the entire visible spectrum.

Nanotechnology has gained a lot of attention over the last few years for making better and efficient light sources. Since perovskites are emerging materials there are no viable approaches for controlled chemical synthesis or mechanical fabrication of perovskite nanostructures.

This project will develop an approach to synthesise/fabricate perovskite nanostructures with control on their size (at the nanometre scale), shape and position using a technique known as 'atomic-layer-deposition'. This will enable us to develop cheap and efficient light sources spanning the entire visible spectrum and combinations of these sources to form white light sources.

This is the first attempt to combine the field of nanotechnology, which is expected to bring in the next wave of photonics revolution with the emerging materials, perovskites, to make efficient light sources. The success of this approach will revolutionise the lighting industry which accounts for a significant part of our energy usage.