Dual-resonance nanostructures for colour down-conversion of colloidal quantum emitters

Linear colour conversion is a process where an emitter absorbs a photon and then emits another photon with either higher or lower energy, corresponding to up- or down conversion, respectively. In this regard, the presence of a volumetric cavity plays a crucial role in enhancing absorption and photoluminescence (PL), as it allows for large volumes of interaction between the exciting photons and the emissive materials, maximising the colour conversion efficiency. Here, we present a dual resonance nanostructure made of a titanium dioxide (TiO2) subwavelength grating to enhance the colour down-conversion efficiency of green light at ~530 nm emitted by gradient alloyed CdxZn1-xSeyS1-y colloidal quantum dots (QDs) when excited with a blue light at ~460 nm. A large mode volume can be created within the QD layer by the hybridisation of the grating resonances and waveguide modes. This allows increasing mode overlap between the resonances and the QDs, resulting in large absorption and tailored emission enhancements. Particularly, we achieved polarized light emission with maximum photoluminescence enhancement of ~140 times at a specific angular direction, and a total enhancement of ~34 times within 0.55 numerical aperture (NA) of the collecting objective. The enhancement encompasses absorption enhancement, Purcell enhancement and directionality enhancement (i.e., outcoupling). We achieved total absorption of 35% for green QDs with a remarkably thin colour conversion layer of ~ 400 nm (inclusive of the TiO2 layer). This work provides a guideline for designing large-volume cavities for practical application in absorption/fluorescence enhancement, such as down colour conversion in microLED displays, detectors or photovoltaics.