On November 20, 2025 (Beijing Time), a research team led by Professors Xu Hui and Han Chunmiao from the School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science of Heilongjiang University, in collaboration with researchers from Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School and the National University of Singapore, published a landmark research result in the top international journal Nature. They successfully solved the charge injection problem of insulating lanthanide-doped nanocrystals and realized efficient tunable electroluminescence. This is the first paper of Heilongjiang University published in Nature, and also the first breakthrough of Heilongjiang Province's chemical discipline in this journal.

Lanthanide-doped nanocrystals are regarded as ideal optical materials due to their narrow-band emission, high color purity and excellent stability. However, their intrinsic insulating property leads to difficulty in charge injection, which has long restricted their application in optoelectronic devices. Abandoning the traditional approach of "forcibly injecting charges", the team innovatively designed arylphosphine oxide carboxylic acid ligands and constructed an energy transfer system similar to "photosynthesis" — organic ligands capture electrogenerated excitons, convert them into triplet excitons through an ultrafast intersystem crossing process, and then efficiently transfer them to lanthanide luminescent centers, thus avoiding traditional technical bottlenecks.

Experimental data show that this strategy achieves a triplet energy transfer efficiency of 96.7%, and the external quantum efficiency of the constructed green electroluminescent device reaches 5.9%, which is 76 times higher than that of unfunctionalized devices, with an exciton utilization rate of 88%. More notably, without changing the device structure, continuous and precise regulation from green light, warm white light to near-infrared light can be achieved only by adjusting the doping composition and concentration of rare earth ions, providing a new material solution for ultra-high-definition displays, near-infrared communication, bioimaging and other fields. It is reported that this achievement stems from 14 years of continuous research by the team, embodying the scientific wisdom of inter-institutional cooperation from the faint, hard-to-detect light in the darkroom initially to the stable and bright multicolor luminescence today.