25th February 2020

As part of this year's Phosphors & Quantum Dots Industry Forum, Dr. Anne Berends, Materials Scientist at Seaborough Research, introduces an innovative new approach to designing luminescent materials that exploits key advantages from both well-known phosphor materials, and novel materials on the nanoscale.

Why have you decided to present at the 2020 Phosphors and Quantum Dots Industry Forum?

The Phosphors and Quantum Dots Industry Forum is the perfect opportunity for us to meet key players from both academia and industry, the forefront of progress in luminescent material technology. I am excited to share our new ideas, and to see how the field is developing.

This year we have done away with PGS and QDF and combined them into one event, the 2020 Phosphors and Quantum Dots Industry Forum, what value do you think this merger will add to the delegate experience?

Combining both phosphor and quantum dot expertise in one meeting opens up the opportunity to combine expert knowledge from both fields and come to new insights on emerging applications. Both classes of luminescent materials have their own unique selling points and I think this year’s conference is a unique event where both worlds meet.

Your presentation is titled “Interparticle Energy Transfer: A Novel Toolbox for Spectral Design” can you tell us why you felt this topic should be shared with the Phosphor and Quantum Dot Industry Forum audience?

The topic of my presentation fits perfectly the scope of this year’s conference, as I will present a new way to design luminescent materials exploiting advantages from both the well-known phosphor materials and materials on the nanoscale. For everyone in the audience there will be well known elements that they can relate to, and elements that are new and exciting. Combined, these elements build up a new class of luminescent materials with unparalleled properties.

What innovation do you hope to see in spectral design over the next few years?

In spectral design there are obvious challenges in the field of general lighting, where light quality and efficiency are now trade-offs, and in displays, where color saturation, brightness, and resolution are hard to simultaneously optimize. Line emitters are perfect candidates for spectral design in any application, as their color purity is extremely high. It will be interesting to see how Seaborough’s approach to design new phosphor materials using line emitters will open up new possibilities for spectral design in the next few years.

With advancements in other display technologies such as MicroLEDs and OLEDs what actions do you think the phosphors and quantum dot industries need to take to remain competitive?

With emerging technologies such as microLEDs and OLEDS, the existing phosphor and quantum dot industries are challenged to develop new materials properties to stay relevant. Particle size and absorption strength are two material characteristics that were less relevant in the past, but will be increasingly important to keep up with new application areas. Again, the new way of designing phosphor materials that I will present can have a big impact on these new technologies.