Rewriting the text books on solid-state lighting

Compound semiconductor LEDs are now ubiquitous in consumer applications ranging from electronics to light bulbs and other solid state lighting.  Efficiencies of scale have brought prices down.  Yet, in the semiconductor world, silicon, which is cheap and available, has time and again reclaimed ground thought inexorably lost to its more expensive compound (more than one element) semiconductor cousins.  Researchers long thought light-emitting applications were beyond silicon's reach, since the semiconductor behavior of crystalline silicon doesn't support the kind of electron behavior needed to make LEDs.

Enter the miracle of nanoscale.  Researchers at KIT and the University of Toronto have discovered that nanosize silicon crystals do a great job of emitting light, and, furthermore, that size-selected nanocrystals emit a range of colored light more efficiently and with better long-term stability compared to conventional LEDs.

Geoffrey A. Ozin, a KIT distinguished research fellow at KIT’s Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) states,

"With the liquid-processed silicon LEDs that may potentially be produced on large areas as well as at low costs, the nanoparticle community enters new territory, the associated potentials of which can hardly be estimated today. But presumably, textbooks about semiconductor components have to be rewritten."

Silicon wins...again.

Read more here.