Kim Jae-hyuk, a researcher at the Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation in the laboratory of Professor Kim Younghoon of the Department of Chemistry at Kookmin University (President Jeong Seung Ryul)—who is scheduled to begin a Ph.D. program in the Department of Chemistry at the Graduate School in the first semester of 2027—recently received the “Outstanding Poster Presentation Award” at the “2026 Fall Conference of the Korean Society of Metals and Materials” in recognition of the originality and excellence of his research.
 
Researcher Kim Jae-hyuk, a member of the Colloidal Energy Nanomaterials Laboratory, presented his research findings at the conference under the title “Mass Synthesis of Monodisperse Perovskite Quantum Dots via Precursor Diffusion Control and Their Application in High-Performance Solar Cells and LEDs.”
 
Perovskite quantum dots are considered a key material for next-generation optoelectronic devices due to their excellent optical properties, such as outstanding color purity and high light absorption coefficients. However, commercialization has been limited by the difficulty of mass-producing them with consistent quality. Researcher Kim Jae-hyuk devised a technique to precisely control nucleation by regulating the diffusion rate of precursors within the reactor, thereby successfully achieving the uniform, large-scale synthesis of high-quality quantum dots. The results of this work, demonstrated in solar cells, were published last July in the international energy journal *ACS Energy Letters* (IF=17.5, top 5.7% in JCR) and garnered significant attention from the academic community.
 
Professor Kim Younghoon’s research team did not stop at the achievement of developing conventional solar cells; instead, they expanded their research scope to the realization of “high-color-purity, high-efficiency, large-area red LEDs” using mass-produced quantum dots. To commercially produce high-efficiency LEDs on an industrial scale, it is essential not only to leverage the optical excellence of quantum dots but also to establish a process for mass-producing ink that has undergone surface treatment to ensure electrical conductivity.
 
The research team solved the challenge of commercialization by developing “device-ready ink” that can be applied directly to devices without any separate, complex post-processing. Notably, even during mass production, the ink maintained an external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 16.32%—more than 90% of the maximum EQE of 18.07% achieved by small-scale laboratory devices. Furthermore, using this ink, the team stably achieved a high EQE of 16.27% in a large-area LED (80 mm²), which is approximately six times the size of a conventional device (13 mm²). 
 
These research findings are expected to serve as foundational technology that demonstrates the versatility of perovskite quantum dot synthesis technology and significantly opens up possibilities for its expansion not only into solar cells but also across the entire next-generation display and LED industries.