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Hybrid organic inorganic light emitting diodes are nowadays attracting great attention
due to their intrinsic air stability and solution processability, which could
result in low-cost, large area, light emitting devices. Despite the fact that high luminance
values have been already demonstrated in recent publications, the efficiency
of HyLEDs has been limited by its peculiar hole-dominated electronic mechanism.
In particular, the electron injection is promoted by the hole accumulation at the
metal oxide EIL/organic interface, but at the same time this mechanism leads to
limits the device efficiency. It is known from the research in OLEDs that when
the recombination zone is close to an interface, exciton quenching and direct charge
recombination can take place. In this thesis, the design rules for standard OLEDs
technology have been applied to HyLEDs in order to overcome those limitations,
and new successful strategies to improve the performances of this new class of devices
have been presented.
Firstly, the use of a charged polymer as electron injection layer from the metal oxide
to the polymer was presented. This approach leads to more efficient HyLEDs and
gives the possibility of using different light-emitting polymer, allowing the tuning of
the emission colour of the device through the whole range of the visible spectra. This
device structure is of particular interest because a multilayer structure composed by
a metal oxide cathode, a conjugated polyelectrolyte EIL, and the active polymer,
was prepared completely by solution processing, thanks to the orthogonality of the solvents used to deposit the subsequent materials.
In chapter 3 it is demonstrated how the hole leakage through the metal oxides EIL is
an important loss factor leading to a lower exciton density in the polymer layer.The
use of insulating metal oxides with very deep valence band resulted in the lowering of
the current density flowing through the device. This effect is due to the high barrier
for holes at the organic/metal oxide interface when using insulating materials like
HfO2 or MgO. Thus, through the employment of these metal oxides, the efficiency
of the HyLEDs can be successfully raised.
It is well known that high efficiency in OLEDs can be raised considerably only when
making use of phosphorescent species. In chapter 4, the use of triplet emitters in
high efficiency solution processed HyLEDs was presented. In that particular device
layout, a novel doped metal oxide cathode was used in order to enhance the electron
injection into the active organic layer and prevent exciton quenching. Very high
efficacy values up to 15 cd/A have been obtained by tuning the composition of the
active organic materials in the polymer layers.
In chapter 5,the performances displayed by HyLEDs using ZnO nanocristals exceed
those obtained by employing polycrystalline ZnO thin films and the effect is attributed
to the larger bandgap of the ZnO NCs caused by quantum confinement. It
was shown that the bandgap diminishes upon temperature assisted agglomeration
which is why best device performances were obtained when simply drying the NCs
at room temperature.The use of solution-processed ZnO NCs in the absence of any
thermal treatment allowed for the preparation of the first bright flexible HyLEDs.
This work clearly underlines the potential of this novel class of devices and it indicates
HyLEDs as a real possible competitor to the current OLED technology.
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