Laser-driven lighting has emerged as a core technology for high-power illumination applications such as automotive headlamps, airport lighting, and outdoor rescue, offering unmatched brightness and directional precision that surpass traditional LED lighting. However, the ultra-high power density of laser diodes (LDs) imposes extreme thermal loads on phosphor converters, triggering severe thermal quenching in mainstream YAG:Ce phosphors. With the intrinsic thermal conductivity of glass-matrix YAG:Ce being only ~2 W·m -1 ·K -1 , and pure YAG:Ce ceramics achieving merely ~9 W·m -1 ·K -1 , heat accumulation significantly degrades luminous efficiency (LE) and constrains further power scaling, presenting a critical bottleneck for the development of kilowatt-level laser lighting. Although secondary phases such as MgAl 2 O 4 and Al 2 O 3 have been introduced to enhance thermal conductivity, the resulting composite ceramics still suffer from insufficient heat dissipation and low LE, failing to meet the demands of high-power LD applications.
To address this industry pain point, a research team of material scientists led by Jiang Li from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China selected aluminum nitride (AlN)—a material with an ultra-high thermal conductivity of ~320 W·m -1 ·K -1 —as the secondary phase and developed a powder-embedding nitrogen atmosphere sintering method to prepare xAlN-YAG:Ce (x = 0, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90 vol.%) composite phosphor ceramics (CPCs). This innovative sintering strategy effectively suppressed phase reactions between AlN and the oxide raw materials, minimizing AlON impurity formation and ensuring high relative density (>99.8%) and uniform phase distribution in the resulting ceramics. Systematic characterizations, including XRD, FESEM, TEM, spectral characteristics, absorption efficiency, quantum efficiency, thermal conductivity, and laser lighting performance of AlN-YAG:Ce CPCs were investigated.
The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on March 24, 2026.
“By introducing AlN into the YAG:Ce matrix, we achieved a synergistic optimization of thermal conductivity and luminescent properties in the composite ceramics—AlN not only improves heat dissipation through its high thermal conductivity but also enhances light scattering to boost luminous efficiency,” said Professor Jiang Li, the corresponding author of the study. Experimental results confirmed the outstanding performance of the prepared ceramics: the 50 vol.% AlN-YAG:Ce CPCs achieved a thermal conductivity of 27.2 W·m -1 ·K -1 —three times that of pure YAG:Ce ceramics—while maintaining comparable luminescence intensity; the 10 vol.% AlN-YAG:Ce CPCs, identified as the optimal composition, exhibited a high LE of 200.1 lm·W -1 and a favorable correlated color temperature (CCT) of 4608 K under 1.3 W·mm -2 blue LD excitation, with the luminescence saturation threshold increased to 17.6 W·mm -2 . Notably, the team integrated the 10 vol.% AlN-YAG:Ce CPCs with a 10 W blue laser to construct a laser illumination prototype, which emitted stable white light with an illumination range exceeding 500 m, demonstrating the practical feasibility of the material for high-power laser lighting applications. The study also observed that trace amounts of AlON impurities and interfacial defects slightly reduced thermal conductivity, prompting future efforts to focus on surface modification and sintering aid optimization to further suppress impurity formation.
This research overcomes the thermal stability bottleneck of YAG:Ce phosphors in high-power laser lighting, and the resulting AlN-YAG:Ce CPCs with photothermal synergy offer a new material solution for the development of kilowatt-level laser-driven lighting systems. With their excellent thermal conductivity, high luminous efficiency, and stable lighting performance, these materials hold broad application prospects in automotive headlamps, military illumination, outdoor rescue, and other high-power lighting fields, laying a solid material foundation for the industrialization of high-performance laser lighting.
Other contributors include Ziqiu Cheng, Zhenzhen Zhou, Yanbin Wang and Chen Hu from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics at Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, Sifan Zhuo, Shisheng Lin and Daqin Chen from College of Physics and Energy at Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, China, Denis Yu. Kosyanov from Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.
About Author
Dr. Jiang Li is a professor of Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SICCAS). Now he is the deputy director of the transparent ceramics research center in SICCAS, the associate editors of the Journal of Advanced Ceramics, Journal of Inorganic Materials, Journal of Advanced Materials Research and Journal of the American Ceramic Society, the editorial board members of Magnetochemistry, Advanced Ceramics, Journal of Functional Materials and Devices, and Journal of Synthetic Crystals. Prof. Li’s research focuses on laser ceramics, scintillation ceramics, magneto-optical ceramics, ceramic phosphors, and other optical transparent ceramics. He has been selected for four consecutive years as the global top 2% scientists "Lifetime Scientific Impact Rankings" list (2024 edition) released by Stanford University. He was invited to give invited reports in the academic conferences for more than 100 times. He is the coordinator in more than 25 domestic and 8 international collaborative projects so far in the field of transparent and opto-functional ceramics. He produced 490 original papers (9850 Citations, 47 H-index) in refereed journals, 3 co-authored textbooks and 2 co-authored book chapters.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFB3506600), the International Cooperation and Exchange Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. W2512070), the Shanghai Partner Research Program (Grant No. 25HB2706600), and the Special Exchange Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No.121631GJHZ2024017TBJH). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the support from the Russian Science Foundation (Project No. 25-73-10179).
About Journal of Advanced Ceramics
Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC) is an international academic journal that presents the state-of-the-art results of theoretical and experimental studies on the processing, structure, and properties of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. JAC is Fully Open Access, monthly published by Tsinghua University Press, and exclusively available via SciOpen . JAC’s 2024 IF is 16.6, ranking in Top 1 (1/34, Q1) among all journals in “Materials Science, Ceramics” category, and its 2024 CiteScore is 25.9 (5/130) in Scopus database. ResearchGate homepage: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Journal-of-Advanced-Ceramics-2227-8508
Journal of Advanced Ceramics
Photothermal synergistic AlN-YAG:Ce composite phosphor ceramics for laser-driven lighting applications
24-Mar-2026