Electrically Pumped White-Light-Emitting Diodes Based on Histidine-Doped MoS Quantum Dots.

MoS quantum dots (QDs)-based white-light-emitting diodes (QD-WLEDs) are designed, fabricated, and demonstrated. The highly luminescent, histidine-doped MoS QDs synthesized by microwave induced fragmentation of 2D MoS nanoflakes possess a wide distribution of available electronic states as inferred from the pronounced excitation-wavelength-dependent emission properties. Notably, the histidine-doped MoS QDs show a very strong emission intensity, which exceeds seven times of magnitude larger than that of pristine MoS QDs. The strongly enhanced emission is mainly attributed to nitrogen acceptor bound excitons and passivation of defects by histidine-doping, which can enhance the radiative recombination drastically. The enabled electroluminescence (EL) spectra of the QD-WLEDs with the main peak around 500 nm are found to be consistent with the photoluminescence spectra of the histidine-doped MoS QDs. The enhanced intensity of EL spectra with the current increase shows the stability of histidine-doped MoS based QD-WLEDs. The typical EL spectrum of the novel QD-WLEDs has a Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage chromaticity coordinate of (0.30, 0.36) exhibiting an intrinsic broadband white-light emission. The unprecedented and low-toxicity QD-WLEDs based on a single light-emitting material can serve as an excellent alternative for using transition metal dichalcogenides QDs as next generation optoelectronic devices.