White Light Emission from Vegetable Extracts

A mixture of extracts from two common vegetables, red pomegranate and turmeric, when photoexcited at 380 nm, produced almost pure white light emission (WLE) with Commission Internationale d’Eclairage (CIE) chromaticity index (0.35, 0.33) in acidic ethanol. It was also possible to obtain WLE in polyvinyl alcohol film (0.32, 0.25) and in gelatin gel (0.26, 0.33) using the same extract mixture. The colour temperature of the WLE was conveniently tunable by simply adjusting the concentrations of the component emitters. The primary emitting pigments responsible for contributing to WLE were polyphenols and anthocyanins from pomegranate and curcumin from turmeric. It was observed that a cascade of Forster resonance energy transfer involving polyphenolics, curcumin and anthocyanins played a crucial role in obtaining a CIE index close to pure white light. The optimized methods of extraction of the two primary emitting pigments from their corresponding plant sources are simple, cheap and fairly green.