RESEARCH PAPER White light-emitting nanocomposites based on an oxadiazole–carbazole copolymer (POC) and InP/ZnS quantum dots Annalisa Bruno • Carmela Borriello • Tiziana Di Luccio • Giuseppe Nenna • Lucia Sessa • Simona Concilio • Saif A. Haque • Carla Minarini Received: 8 August 2013 / Accepted: 16 October 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In this work, we studied energetic and optical proprieties of a polyester-containing oxadiaz- ole and carbazole units that we will indicate as POC. This polymer is characterized by high photolumines- cence activity in the blue region of the visible spectrum, making it suitable for the development of efficient white-emitting organic light emission devices. Moreover, POC polymer has been combined with two red emitters InP/ZnS quantum dots (QDs) to obtain nanocomposites with wide emission spectra. The two types of QDs have different absorption wavelengths: 570 nm [InP/ZnS(570)] and 627 nm [InP/ZnS(627)] and were inserted in the polymer at different concentrations. The optical properties of the nanocomposites have been investigated and compared to the ones of the pure polymer. Both spectral and time resolved fluorescence measurements show an efficient energy transfer from the polymer to QDs, resulting in white-emitting nanocomposites. Keywords Nanocomposites  Polymers  Time resolved luminescence  Quantum dots  OLED  Energy saving lighting Introduction Low cost and simple preparation methods of thin layers of conjugated polymers have driven the devel- opment of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) employing these materials as active layers (Forrest 2004). Typical conjugated polymers used in OLED devices include derivatives of poly(p-phenylene vinyl- ene) (Burroughes et al. 1990) and polyfluorene (Friend et al. 1999; Wu et al. 2005; Liu et al. 2002). Even if the fluorine-based polymers are strong and efficient blue emitters, their electroluminescence often presents a green component due to the formation of fluorenone units (Grem et al. 1992; Adachi et al. 1990) not easy to control. Therefore, the synthesis of alternative poly- mers is still a very active field of research. A. Bruno (&)  C. Borriello (&)  T. Di Luccio (&)  G. Nenna  C. Minarini ENEA, UTTP NANO, Centro Ricerche Portici, Portici, NA, Italy e-mail: annalisa.bruno@enea.it C. Borriello e-mail: carmela.borriello@enea.it T. Di Luccio e-mail: tiziana.diluccio@enea.it A. Bruno  S. A. Haque Chemistry Department, Imperial College London, London, UK L. Sessa Department of Pharmacy, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy S. Concilio Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy 123 J Nanopart Res (2013) 15:2085 DOI 10.1007/s11051-013-2085-4