Amphoteric Chelating Ultrasmall Colloids for FAPbI₃ Nanodomains Enable Efficient Near-Infrared Light-Emitting Diodes

Perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs) are the next promising display technologies because of their high color purity and wide color gamut, while two classical emitter forms, i.e., polycrystalline domains and quantum dots, are encountering bottlenecks. Weak carrier confinement of large polycrystalline domains leads to inadequate radiative recombination, and surface ligands on quantum dots are the main annihilation sites for injected carriers. Here, pinpointing these issues, we screened out an amphoteric agent, namely, 2-(2-aminobenzoyl)benzoic acid (2-BA), to precisely control the in situ growth of FAPbI₃ (FA: formamidine) nanodomains with enhanced space confinement, preferred crystal orientation, and passivated trap states on the transport-layer substrate. The amphoteric 2-BA performs bidentate chelating functions on the formation of ultrasmall perovskite colloids (<1 nm) in the precursor, resulting in a smoother FAPbI₃ emitting layer. Based on monodispersed and homogeneous nanodomain films, a near-infrared PeLED device with a champion efficiency of >22% plus enhanced T₈₀ operational stability was achieved. The proposed perovskite nanodomain film tends to be a mainstream emitter toward the performance breakthrough of PeLED devices covering visible wavelengths beyond infrared.