Transparent Composite Ceramic@aluminum with Ultra‐High Thermal Conductivity for High‐Brightness Laser‐Driven Lighting

Abstract

Next‐generation high‐brightness lighting faces a big challenge in developing laser‐drivable color‐converting materials with effective thermal management. Herein, a new material architecture of Al2O3‐Y3Al5O12: Ce3+ (YAG: Ce) transparent composite ceramics coated with Al film (TCC@Al) is proposed. The as‐prepared material shows the highest thermal conductivity (29.3 W m−1 K−1) among YAG: Ce‐related transparent ceramics (TC) ever reported owing to the combination role of short‐range thermal conduction of Al2O3 microcrystals and long‐range thermal conduction of Al film. Temperature‐dependent photoluminescence (PL) spectra and femtosecond transient absorption (fs‐TA) spectra evidence the importance of thermal management, whereby the luminescent loss of TCC@Al is only 8.92% at 450 K and is far smaller than TC counterpart (15.86%). Importantly, no obvious luminescence saturation is detected upon 20 W mm−2 blue laser irradiation and the inhomogeneous angular color distribution is suppressed by the scatter of Al2O3 microcrystals, yielding uniform white light with ultra‐high luminous flux (LF) of 4294 lm@20 W mm−2 and luminous efficacy (LE) of 215 lm W−1. As a consequence, the present TCC@Al‐converted laser‐driven lighting prototype exhibits much better optical performance than the commercial TC‐based one.