Highly Polarized Fluorescent Film Based on Aligned Quantum Rods by Contact Ink-Jet Printing Method

• Main Authors: Ziming Zhou, Kai Wang, Zhe Zhang, Chaojian Zhang, Haochen Liu, Yang Zhang, Zuoliang Wen, Shang Li, Junjie Hao, Bing Xu, Stephen John Pennycook, Kie Leong Teo, Xiao Wei Sun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Photonics Journal
• Subjects: Alignment; contact ink-jet printing; polarization; quantum rods.
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8654624/

Fluorescent quantum rods (QRs) have received much attention recently because of their properties of polarized light emission with narrow full width at half-maximum. Therefore, QRs can be used in liquid crystal display (LCD) backlight, as an active polarizer. In order to emit light with a high degree of polarization (DOP), QRs need to be controlled and aligned along one direction on large-scaled devices. However, most of the proposed effective alignment approaches cannot be applied to a large area. In this paper, we report for the first time the contact ink-jet printing (CIJP) method to align CdSe/CdS core/shell QRs. With the ink being printed, the QRs can align along the fluid ink flow direction resulting in aligned QRs along printing direction and forming a film with a high DOP of 42%. Furthermore, CIJP can realize arbitrarily large area fabrication without reducing DOP value. It is expected that this method can be utilized to print on large-scaled substrates directly to fabricate polarized optoelectronic devices, and further applied to LCD backlights and any other applications where polarized light is needed.