LED lighting is quickly replacing traditional fluorescent and incandescent lighting due to their higher efficiency, long operating lifetimes, and environmentally friendly compositions. One method to produce white light from a monochromatic LED is to combine a near-UV LED chip with three inorganic phosphors (blue, green, and red-emitting materials). This approach has the advantage of high color quality due to the phosphors covering the entire visible spectrum as well as the generation of a tunable white light. Unfortunately, the large Stokes’ shift between the phosphor excitation and emission wavelengths inherently reduces the overall device efficiencies. To overcome this loss, the three phosphors incorporated into this device must be extremely efficient with a high photoluminescent quantum yield. Currently, there are a limited number of known, blue emitting phosphors with a quantum yield near unity. The standard blue emitting phosphor used widely throughout industry is BaMgAl10O17:Eu2+ (BAM), which has the required high efficiency but oxidizes under long-term operation. A number of new, efficient blue phosphors have also been recently reported in the BaO–Y2O3–B2O3 composition space. One of the most interesting is the cubic Ba3Y2B6O15:Ce3+. The phase can be prepared through traditional high temperature solid state synthesis and characterized using high-resolution, synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction. Ba3Y2B6O15:Ce3+ produces bright blue emission (λmax,em = 446 nm) with a photoluminescent quantum yield of approximately 80%. More importantly, the full-width at half maximum of the emission is only 142,857.14 cm-1, which is significantly narrower than almost all currently known Ce3+ phosphors. The combination a very narrow emission spectrum and a high PLQY indicates that Ba3Y2B6O15:Ce3+ could be an excellent phosphor for incorporation into a three-phosphor, near-UV LED system.

Structural and optical properties of Ba3Y2B6O15:Ce3+: A cubic borate with extremely narrow, high efficiency photon emission

255th National Meeting (2018)

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