Surface ligand engineering renders tube-like perovskite nanocrystal composites with outstanding polar organic solvent-tolerance and strong emission

Despite intriguing physic-optical property of cesium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (CsPbX₃ NCs), the practical application is primarily hindered by their intrinsic instability. In this work, tube-like perovskite nanocrystal composites (denoted PDVB@CsPbBr₃@SiO₂ NCCs) are prepared via capitalizing on polymer nanotube as a nanoreactor in conjunction with concurrent in-situ silica encapsulation. By engineering surface ligand of silanes, the resulting PDVB@CsPbBr₃@SiO₂ NCCs exhibit no obvious PL loss after continuous UV irradiation for 30 day, heating at 80 °C for 48 h, and exposure to ambient air (with a humidity > 75%) for 60 day, which is superior to previous reports. Most importantly, PL intensity of PDVB@CsPbBr₃@SiO₂ NCCs is significantly enhanced after exposure to various polar organic solvents (POS) including MeOH, EtOH, IPA, DMF, THF and CHCl₃, and kept strong emission after 30 day. Such dramatically improved stability of PDVB@CsPbBr₃@SiO₂ NCCs in POS may be attributed to the two-side protection from PDVB and SiO₂ together with efficient surface passivation with solvent molecules as revealed by time-resolved PL measurement. In addition, using green emission of PDVB@CsPbBr₃@SiO₂ NCCs as color-converting component in liquid–crystal display (LCD) backlight film give rise to colorful and bright images with wide color gamut of 126.8%. This work represents a facile and robust strategy to craft polar organic solvent (POS)-tolerance perovskite nanocrystal composites with high emission, which shows grand promising in various catalysis reactions and optoelectronic devices.