Stable, Strongly Emitting Cesium Lead Bromide Perovskite Nanorods with High Optical Gain Enabled by an Intermediate Monomer Reservoir Synthetic Strategy

One-dimensional (1D) semiconductor nanorods are important for numerous applications ranging from optics and electronics to biology, yet the direct synthesis of high-quality metal halide perovskite nanorods remains a challenge. Here, we develop an intermediate monomer reservoir synthetic strategy to realize the controllable growth of uniform and low-defect CsPbBr₃ perovskite nanorods. Intermediates composed of CsPb₂Br₅ and Cs₃In₂Br₉ are obtained through the substitution of Pb²⁺ with In³⁺ cations in the template of CsPbBr₃ nanocubes and act as a precursor reservoir to gradually release monomers, ensuring both the slow growth rate and low defects of nanorods. We have used branched tris(diethylamino)phosphine as a ligand, which not only has unequal binding energies with different crystal faces to promote the orientation growth but also provides strong steric hindrance to shield the nanorods in solution. Because of minor amount of defects and an effective ligand passivation, in addition to significantly enhanced stability, the perovskite nanorods show a high photoluminescence quantum yield of up to 90% and exhibit a net mode gain of 980 cm⁻¹, the latter being a record value among all the perovskite materials. An extremely low amplified spontaneous emission threshold of 7.5 μJ cm⁻² is obtained under excitation by a nanosecond laser, which is comparable to that obtained using femtosecond lasers in other recent studies.