A Universal Approach to the Fast Discovery of New Nitride Phosphors

     Discoveries of novel luminescent materials are of fundamental importance in the advancement of lighting and display technologies. Current routine methods for this purpose inevitably involve the initial preparation of a high quality single crystal or a single-phase compound, which are known as time-consuming and labor intensive one-by-one processes. In this presentation,  we introduce  a simple single-particle-diagnosis method for rapid discovery of totally new nitride luminescent materials, just through determining the crystal structure, composition and photoluminescence properties of a single luminescent particle. The luminescent particle was distinguished and captured directly from the synthesized powder mixture containing different crystalline phases, on the basis of its characteristic emission color and morphology. The crystal structure of the single particle was determined by a fine-focus single-crystal X-ray diffractometer, and the photoluminescence properties (i.e., luminescence spectra, thermal quenching and quantum efficiency) were measured on a single phosphor using home-built fluorescence microspectroscopy.  This method has enabled us to discover new yellow and blue phosphors in the Si₃N₄-Ba₃N₂-AlN ternary system, and a additional 48 in other systems.