18.1: Invited Paper: Efficiency, stability, and angular dependence of plasmonic PHOLEDs

Until recently, organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) have operated under the paradigm that the surface plasmon mode of contacts is lossy and should be avoided. We proposed and demonstrated a phosphorescent light emitting device (PHOLED) which intentionally couples the emissive exciton to the plasmon mode of a nearby metal contact to reduce the excited state lifetime [1]. This, in turn, reduces the steady state exciton density and the likelihood of destabilizing excited state interactions. We further demonstrated that a nanoparticle‐based outcoupling scheme extracts the energy coupled to the plasmon mode into air. In this paper, we demonstrate that the plasmon based PHOLED can exceed the efficiency of a conventional PHOLED while simultaneously increasing the stability.