Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2025 Conference (MATSUSSpring25)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsusspring.2025.051
Publication date: 16th December 2024
Organic light-emitting diodes have been successfully commercialized by the display industry, yet there are still basic challenges in modeling their operation and degradation. In this talk, I will highly recent work establishing the thermodynamic limit of OLEDs, which shows that strong exciton binding in these devices requires a higher voltage to achieve the same luminance as a comparable inorganic LED, and that the best OLEDs reported to date have likely reached this limit. I will discuss how the well-known Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) expression for trap-mediated recombination in OLEDs is modified to account for the finite lifetime of dopant excitons and its implication for minimizing OLED drive voltage. Finally, I will discuss recent work focused on understanding blue OLED degradation where exciton-polaron-based degradation kinetics are implemented into a drift-diffusion-based device model. The results suggest that OLED luminance loss and voltage rise largely originate from different sets of degradation-induced defect states formed in the emissive and transport layers, respectively, which opens up new opportunities to optimize the performance and lifetime of these devices.