All-inorganic cesium lead halide (CsPbX3, X = Cl, Br, I) perovskite quantum-dots (PQDs) glass exhibits exceptional optical and electrical properties, such as high quantum yield (QY), high purity, tunable emission wavelength, high defect tolerance, and fast charge carrier diffusion rates, making them promising for a wide range of applications in photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photodetectors, lasers, and other optoelectronic devices. However, perovskite quantum dots are prone to degradation due to their ionic to enhance their stability and maintain the high luminescence efficiency, researchers have begun to incorporate these CsPbX3 quantum dots into high-transparency glass substrates with excellent thermal, mechanical, and chemical stability. In recent years, many researchers have successfully synthesized PQDs embedded glass systems such as silicate, germanate, tellurite, phosphate, and borate, and have applied the synthesized material in fields of optical sensing, X-ray imaging, lasers, optical information storage, and optical anti-counterfeiting.
Common methods to prepare PQDs embedded glass include melt-quenching method, mechanical stress-induced method, and water-induced methods. Both thermal treatment methods fail to localize crystallization, while stress- or water-induced crystallization detrimentally affect the glass structure and introduce toxicity from surface heavy metal Pb, significantly limit their application prospects. Fortunately, ultra-short pulse laser, femtosecond laser processing of transparent materials, has been demonstrated as an effective means to construct three-dimensional photonic device structures. This facilitates the materials to be hopefully applied in nonlinear optics, optical data storage, and nanophotonics. Femtosecond laser interacts with transparent materials via multiphoton absorption, circumventing the need to consider material absorption or introduce new absorption centers, and the highly localized energy of focused ultra-short pulse laser is achieved. The high spatial resolution of this processing is realized by the rapid redistribution of atoms at the laser focus induced by successive nonlinear optical processes. This technique has been successfully applied to introduce microcracks, alter micro-zone refractive indices, and form nanocrystals. Compared to traditional methods for preparing perovskite quantum dots, femtosecond laser is more suitable for precipitating perovskite quantum dots within transparent glass materials.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the progress made in studying the crystallization and optical properties of CsPbX3 PQDs embedded glass under femtosecond laser irradiation, and offers new ideas and insights for future research and application of PQDs embedded glass regulated by femtosecond laser.
Summary and prospects Coating PQDs in transparent glass media has greatly enhanced stability while maintaining excellent optical properties, so as to attract widespread attention from researchers in recent years. Utilizing femtosecond laser technology enables the manipulation of crystallization behavior of perovskite quantum dot glass in three-dimensional space, which holds significant implications for three-dimensional optical information encryption and storage. Additionally, the interaction between femtosecond laser and PQDs embedded glass enables reversible luminescence, laser emission, polarization, and long persistent luminescence properties, significantly expanding the application domains of PQDs embedded glass. However, many challenges still exist in the direction of femtosecond laser and PQDs embedded glass that researchers need to explore and resolve. The challenges are: how to use femtosecond laser to fabricate perovskite waveguides or single crystals in glass, potentially endowing inorganic glass with optoelectronic properties; how to design and to fabricate lead-free perovskite glass using femtosecond laser to further investigate its optical applications while maintaining non-toxic high optical performance; how to utilize femtosecond laser as pump sources to achieve laser output from PQDs embedded glass at room temperature; how to design specific optical devices and principles to further reduce the size of PQDs written inside glass to the nanometer scale using femtosecond laser, which is expected to greatly enhance the three-dimensional optical information storage capacity, etc. It is believed that in the near future, PQDs embedded glass under the influence of femtosecond lasers will lead us into a brand-new optoelectronic world.