Increasing OLED stability: Plasmonic PHOLED

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new light emitting device where phosphorescent emitters are intentionally coupled to the surface plasmon mode of a nearby metal electrode for decay rate enhancement. This energy is subsequently converted to photons in free space via a nanoparticle-based out-coupling scheme allowing us to harvest both efficiency and stability gains. Compared to a reference OLED based on conventional device design, our new architecture achieves a two-fold increase in operational stability at the same brightness while simultaneously outcoupling 8% of photons from the device.