Soft structures in nature such as protein assemblies can organize reversibly into functional and often hierarchical architectures through noncovalent interactions. Molecularly encoding this dynamic capability in synthetic materials has remained an elusive goal. We report on hydrogels of peptide-DNA conjugates and peptides that organize into superstructures of intertwined filaments that disassemble upon the addition of molecules or changes in charge density. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that this response requires large scale spatial redistribution of molecules directed by strong noncovalent interactions among them. Simulations also suggest that the chemically reversible structures can only occur within a limited range of supramolecular cohesive energies. Storage moduli of the hydrogels change reversibly as superstructures form and disappear, as does the phenotype of neural cells in contact with these materials.

The electrical and optical improvements of AlGaInP micro-light-emitting diodes (µLEDs) using atomic-layer deposition (ALD) sidewall passivation were demonstrated. Due to the high surface recombination velocity and minority carrier diffusion length of the AlGaInP material system, devices without sidewall passivation suffered from high leakage and severe drop in external quantum efficiency (EQE). By employing ALD sidewall treatments, the 20×20 µm2 µLEDs resulted in greater light output power, size-independent leakage current density, and lower ideality factor. The forward current-voltage characteristic was enhanced by using surface pretreatment. Furthermore, ALD sidewall treatments recovered the EQE of the 20×20 µm2 devices more than 150%. This indicated that AlGaInP µLEDs with ALD sidewall treatments can be used as the red emitter for full-color µLED display applications.

Red micro-light-emitting diodes (μLEDs) have been generated significant interest for the next generation μLEDs displays. It has been shown that the external quantum efficiency (EQE) of AlInGaP red μLEDs markedly decreases as the size goes to very small dimension. Here, we demonstrate size-independent peak EQE of 611 nm InGaN red μLEDs. Packaged μLEDs show a peak EQE varied from 2.4% to 2.6% as the device area reduces from 100 × 100 to 20 × 20 μm2. These results demonstrate the promising potential for realizing high efficiency red μLED with very small size using InGaN materials.

In this study, two methods to tune the emission wavelength of micro-LEDs fabricated on tile patterned compliant GaN-on-porous-GaN pseudo-substrates (PSs) are presented. The mechanical flexibility of porous GaN was utilized to relax the strain induced during the growth of light-emitting diode (LED) structures with n- and p-InGaN layers and enhance the indium incorporation via the composition pulling effect. The first approach involved only varying the size of the PS square tiles used for LED structure regrowth, from 20 × 20 μm2 to 8 × 8 μm2. Higher n-InGaN base layer relaxation with decreasing tile size resulted in a red shift of emission from 525 nm to 561 nm with no change in the growth conditions. The second method involved changing the mole fraction, x, of the n-InxGa1−xN base layer of the LED structure from 0.04 to 0.09 by reducing growth temperature, while maintaining the high temperature growth conditions of the multi-quantum well (MQW) and p-InGaN targeting 530 nm emission. The resulting wavelength shift was a remarkable 536–616 nm due to the stronger composition pulling effect, providing a pathway to enable high indium content MQW active regions to be grown at high temperature.

We study the high-temperature electroluminescence properties of 600 nm InGaN red 40 × 40 μm2 micro-light-emitting diodes (μLEDs) with a peak external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 3.2%. Temperature-dependent peak wavelength measurements show a low redshift of 0.05 nm/K. The injection efficiency improves with increasing temperature. The hot/cold (HC) factor is used to quantify the thermal droop: at 400 K, the EQE and wall-plug efficiency HC factors at 50 A/cm2 reach high values of 0.72 and 0.85, respectively. This demonstrates the robustness of InGaN red μLEDs up to high temperature, with a much-improved stability over conventional AlInGaP red μLEDs.