Stable, Heat-Conducting Phosphor Composites for High-Power Laser Lighting.

Solid-state lighting using laser diodes is an exciting new development that requires new phosphor geometries to handle the greater light fluxes involved. The greater flux from the source results in more conversion and therefore more conversion loss in the phosphor, which generates self-heating, surpassing the stability of current encapsulation strategies used for light-emitting diodes, usually based on silicones. Here, we present a rapid method using spark plasma sintering (SPS) for preparing ceramic phosphor composites of the canonical yellow-emitting phosphor Ce-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Ce:YAG) combined with a chemically compatible and thermally stable oxide, α-AlO.

Solution-based carbohydrate synthesis of individual solid, hollow, and porous carbon nanospheres using spray pyrolysis.

A facile and scalable solution-based, spray pyrolysis synthesis technique was used to synthesize individual carbon nanospheres with specific surface area (SSA) up to 1106 m(2)/g using a novel metal-salt catalyzed reaction. The carbon nanosphere diameters were tunable from 10 nm to several micrometers by varying the precursor concentrations. Solid, hollow, and porous carbon nanospheres were achieved by simply varying the ratio of catalyst and carbon source without using any templates.