Given increasing energy demand and environmental considerations, solid-state lighting, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), has been considered to be the next generation of lighting sources owing to its advanced properties of high luminous efficiency, low power consumption, fast response, and so forth. An efficient and commercial route to the construction of LEDs is to combine UV/blue LED chips with phosphors which play as color converters to achieve desired emission. The two types of most common phosphors are rare-earth-based phosphors, such as YAG:Ce or Sr₃SiO₅, and organic fluorescent materials, such as dyes or conjugated polymers. However, these two kinds of phosphors also display obvious disadvantages, the former synthesized from rare and expensive raw materials and high reaction temperature and showing low color rendering index, and the latter suffering low chemical and thermally stability. Thus, much effort has been devoted to the exploration of improved phosphors, and considerable attention has been paid to fluorescent nanomaterials such as semiconductor quantum dots and carbon dots recently. Due to their tunable emission wavelengths, and high emission efficiencies and color saturation, fluorescent nanomaterials become the promising candidates of color converters for LEDs.

Recent advances in the synthesis of novel fluorescent nanomaterials toward the fabrication of LEDs inspired us to edit this special issue of Journal of Nanomaterials, which is focused on their synthesis, surface engineering, characterization, properties, and further application in LEDs. We cordially invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate further activities in this area and improve our understanding of the key scientific problems. We are particularly interested in articles describing the synthesis of fluorescent nanomaterials with high color rendering index, stable chemical properties, long lifetime, and low cost, which may greatly benefit their performance. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Recent progresses in fluorescent nanomaterials toward LEDs
• High-performance colloidal semiconductor quantum dots for LEDs
• Quantum dot-based nanocomposites for LEDs
• Fluorescent carbon dots for LEDs
• Rare-earth-based fluorescent nanomaterials for LEDs
• Organic-inorganic fluorescent nanocomposites for LEDs
• Nanostructured fluorescent thin films
• Characterization of fluorescent nanomaterials
• Novel routes/methods to synthesize fluorescent nanomaterials
• Photoluminescence enhancement approaches for nanomaterials

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnm/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: