The field of plasmonics, which studies the resonant interactions of electromagnetic waves and free electrons in solid-state materials1, has yet to be put to large-scale commercial application2 owing to the large amount of loss that usually occurs in plasmonic materials3. Organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs)4-7 have been incorporated into billions of commercial products because of their good colour saturation, versatile form factor8 and low power consumption9, but could still be improved in terms of efficiency and stability. Although OLEDs incorporating organic phosphors achieve an internal charge-to-light conversion of unity10, their refractive index contrast reduces the observable fraction of photons outside the device to around 25 per cent11-13. Further, during OLED operation, a localized buildup of slow-decaying14 triplet excitons and charges15 gradually reduces the brightness of the device in a process called ageing16,17, which can result in 'burn-in' effects on the display. Simultaneously improving device efficiency and stability is of paramount importance for OLED technology. Here we demonstrate an OLED that uses the decay rate enhancement18 of a plasmonic system to increase device stability, while maintaining efficiency by incorporating a nanoparticle-based out-coupling scheme to extract energy from the plasmon mode. Using an archetypal phosphorescent emitter, we achieve a two-fold increase in operational stability at the same brightness as a reference conventional device while simultaneously extracting 16 per cent of the energy from the plasmon mode as light. Our approach to increasing OLED stability avoids material-specific designs19-22 and is applicable to all commercial OLEDs that are currently used for lighting panels, televisions and mobile displays.

中文翻译：

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有机发光器件稳定性和亮度的等离子体增强

研究固态材料中电磁波和自由电子共振相互作用的等离子体领域尚未投入大规模商业应用 2，因为等离子体材料中通常会发生大量损失。有机发光器件 (OLED)4-7 因其良好的色彩饱和度、通用的外形 8 和低功耗 9 已被纳入数十亿种商业产品，但在效率和稳定性方面仍有待提高。尽管包含有机磷光体的 OLED 实现了内部电荷到光的统一转换 10，但它们的折射率对比度将设备外部的光子的可观察部分降低到 25% 左右 11-13。此外，在 OLED 操作期间，缓慢衰减 14 三重态激子和电荷 15 的局部累积会在称为老化 16、17 的过程中逐渐降低设备的亮度，这可能会导致显示器出现“老化”效应。同时提高器件效率和稳定性对于 OLED 技术至关重要。在这里，我们展示了一种 OLED，它使用等离子体系统的衰减率增强 18 来提高设备稳定性，同时通过结合基于纳米粒子的外耦合方案从等离子体模式中提取能量来保持效率。使用原型磷光发射器，我们在与参考传统设备相同的亮度下实现了操作稳定性的两倍增加，同时从等离子体模式中提取 16% 的能量作为光。