Narrow Intrinsic Line Widths and Electron–Phonon Coupling of InP Colloidal Quantum Dots

InP quantum dots (QDs) are the material of choice for QD display applications and have been used as active layers in QD light-emitting diodes (QDLEDs) with high efficiency and color purity. Optimizing the color purity of QDs requires understanding mechanisms of spectral broadening. While ensemble-level broadening can be minimized by synthetic tuning to yield monodisperse QD sizes, single QD line widths are broadened by exciton–phonon scattering and fine-structure splitting. Here, using photon-correlation Fourier spectroscopy, we extract average single QD line widths of 50 meV at 293 K for red-emitting InP/ZnSe/ZnS QDs, among the narrowest for colloidal QDs. We measure InP/ZnSe/ZnS single QD emission line shapes at temperatures between 4 and 293 K and model the spectra using a modified independent boson model. We find that inelastic acoustic phonon scattering and fine-structure splitting are the most prominent broadening mechanisms at low temperatures, whereas pure dephasing from elastic acoustic phonon scattering is the primary broadening mechanism at elevated temperatures, and optical phonon scattering contributes minimally across all temperatures. Conversely for CdSe/CdS/ZnS QDs, we find that optical phonon scattering is a larger contributor to the line shape at elevated temperatures, leading to intrinsically broader single-dot line widths than for InP/ZnSe/ZnS. We are able to reconcile narrow low-temperature line widths and broad room-temperature line widths within a self-consistent model that enables parametrization of line width broadening, for different material classes. This can be used for the rational design of more spectrally narrow materials. Our findings reveal that red-emitting InP/ZnSe/ZnS QDs have intrinsically narrower line widths than typically synthesized CdSe QDs, suggesting that these materials could be used to realize QDLEDs with high color purity.