Mahdi’s paper on “Predicting Thermal Quenching in Inorganic Phosphors” has just been published in Chemistry of Materials! Phosphors are used in energy efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs). A key performance metric of a phosphor is its thermal quenching (TQ), which is the percentage loss of emission at elevated temperatures during operation. In this work, we develop a new approach to predicting TQ in phosphors using ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations and the band gap of the phosphor host. We demonstrate for the first time that TQ under the crossover mechanism is related to the local environment stability of the activator. Further, by accounting for the effect of the crystal field on the thermal ionization barrier, we show that a unified model can predict the experimental TQ in 29 known phosphors to within a root-mean-square error of ∼3.1−7.6%.
Check out the work at this link.