Elaborate Size-Tuning of Silica Aerogel Building Blocks Enables Laser-Driven Lighting

Silica aerogels with accurate building-block control are realized by adjusting the surfactant concentration during the synthesis process. The resulting silica-aerogel monolith with spherical building blocks of ≈24-40 nm, together with a deliberately created hole along the incident light direction, shows an incredibly promising application in monochromatic laser-driven lighting. The resulting coefficient of illuminance variation is as low as 8.1%, significantly outperforming commercially available ground-glass diffusers (139.0%) and polymer diffusers (249.1%); the speckle contrast is lower, as well as better, than that can be recognized by the human eye (4%), and the illuminance uniformity in the range of 0.770-0.862 is much better (higher) than that indoor workplace lighting required by the International Organization for Standardization. Lighting with any color in the visible spectrum, including white, can be obtained by using three primary color lasers (450, 532, and 638 nm) with different powers simultaneously as the light source. The resulting silica aerogel, which has excellent thermal stability, high laser-damage threshold, outstanding mechanical performance, and superhydrophobicity, can be further applied to long-distance and noncontact laser-driven lighting in rain or underwater without any additional encapsulation components.