Stable blue phosphorescent organic LEDs that use polariton-enhanced Purcell effects

Phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PHOLEDs) feature high efficiency^1,2, brightness and colour tunability suitable for both display and lighting applications³. However, overcoming the short operational lifetime of blue PHOLEDs remains one of the most challenging high-value problems in the field of organic electronics. Their short lifetimes originate from the annihilation of high-energy, long-lived blue triplets that leads to molecular dissociation^4-7. The Purcell effect, the enhancement of the radiative decay rate in a microcavity, can reduce the triplet density and, hence, the probability of destructive high-energy triplet-polaron annihilation (TPA)^5,6 and triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) events^4,5,7,8. Here we introduce the polariton-enhanced Purcell effect in blue PHOLEDs. We find that plasmon-exciton polaritons⁹ (PEPs) substantially increase the strength of the Purcell effect and achieve an average Purcell factor (PF) of 2.4 ± 0.2 over a 50-nm-thick emission layer (EML) in a blue PHOLED. A 5.3-fold improvement in LT90 (the time for the PHOLED luminance to decay to 90% of its initial value) of a cyan-emitting Ir-complex device is achieved compared with its use in a conventional PHOLED. Shifting the chromaticity coordinates to (0.14, 0.14) and (0.15, 0.20) into the deep blue, the Purcell-enhanced devices achieve 10-14 times improvement over similarly deep-blue PHOLEDs, with one structure reaching the longest Ir-complex device lifetime of LT90 = 140 ± 20 h reported so far^10-21. The polariton-enhanced Purcell effect and microcavity engineering provide new possibilities for extending deep-blue PHOLED lifetimes.