Ligand-engineered CsEuI3 nanocrystals deliver efficient single-component white electroluminescence

Researchers report ligand-engineered CsEuI3 nanocrystals that produce efficient white electroluminescence from a single emitter material, reaching a peak external quantum efficiency of 8.3% and a maximum luminance of 8,941 cd m−2, according to a study published in Nature Photonics on 29 October 2026. As a proof of concept, the team monolithically integrated the resulting white perovskite light-emitting diodes onto a 256 × 256 active-matrix display chip, demonstrating dynamic video and full-colour images with a 124% NTSC colour gamut.

The work addresses a persistent bottleneck in next-generation full-colour displays. Perovskite light-emitting diodes are considered promising candidates for such applications, but building full-colour active-matrix displays has remained difficult because efficiency varies across the red, green and blue primary colours, and the materials are often incompatible with high-resolution patterning techniques. The study’s authors propose an alternative route: white perovskite LEDs paired with colour filters, which they describe as a simplified and potentially more efficient approach to full-colour displays.

The core of the advance lies in how the nanocrystals are engineered. In CsEuI3@mCP nanocrystals, where mCP stands for 1,3-bis(N-carbazolyl)benzene, the intrinsic CsEuI3 inorganic field preserves blue emission from Eu2+ ions. At the same time, surface ligand interactions modify the local Eu2+ environment and introduce complementary long-wavelength emission. The combination of preserved blue emission and ligand-induced longer-wavelength components produces white light with a high colour rendering index of 85.7 and near-ideal CIE chromaticity coordinates of (0.33, 0.34).

The ligand does more than shape the emission spectrum. According to the abstract, mCP also promotes the electrical activation of Eu2+ emissive centres and enables ligand-assisted excitation involving singlet- and triplet-related states. This coupling of electrical activation with spectral modulation in a rare-earth electroluminescent material is what the authors highlight as the broader significance of the strategy, establishing ligand engineering as a route to controlling both charge injection and emission colour in a single material system.

The demonstration extends beyond device-level performance to display integration. The white perovskite LEDs were implemented with the CsEuI3@mCP nanocrystals as the emitter and were monolithically integrated onto a thin-film transistor backplane in a 256 × 256 active-matrix configuration, forming a full-colour display chip capable of showing dynamic video and full-colour images. Because the white emission comes from a single component, the architecture avoids the need to pattern separate red, green and blue emitters, which is one of the challenges the authors identify for conventional full-colour active-matrix approaches.

The reported figures come from the article’s abstract and figure captions; the full study is behind a subscription paywall, so detailed device statistics, stability data and methods are not available in the openly accessible material. Readers should therefore treat the efficiency, luminance, colour rendering and colour gamut values as the authors’ reported results for these specific laboratory devices rather than as independently verified commercial benchmarks. The work was published in Nature Photonics, with Jinghui Li and Longbo Yang listed among the contributing authors alongside a team led by Jiang Tang.

Subject of Research: Ligand-engineered CsEuI3 nanocrystals for efficient single-component white electroluminescence in full-colour displays

Article Title: Ligand-engineered CsEuI3 nanocrystals for efficient single-component white electroluminescence

Article References: Li, J., Yang, L., Wu, X., Du, J., Liu, Z., Zheng, G., Zhu, J., Huang, Y., Li, Z., Du, H., Yan, S., Li, L., Yuan, Z., Luo, J., & Tang, J. (2026). Ligand-engineered CsEuI3 nanocrystals for efficient single-component white electroluminescence. Nature Photonics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-026-02039-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41566-026-02039-2

Keywords: perovskite LEDs, CsEuI3 nanocrystals, white electroluminescence, ligand engineering, europium, full-colour displays, active-matrix, colour rendering index, external quantum efficiency, rare-earth emitters, NTSC colour gamut, display technology