Prof. DONG Huanli from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with Prof. HU Wenping from Tianjin University, have developed organic materials that naturally emit white polarized light. This breakthrough marks an important step in organic light-emitting materials, and opens new possibilities for creating small, energy-efficient devices that produce polarized light.

Polarized light-emitting materials are important for many technologies, including displays, lighting, and optical communication. However, effective methods and suitable materials producing polarized light-emitting materials still a great challenge.

The researchers successfully employ a bimolecular doping method based on highly polarized, blue-emitting 2,6-diphenylanthracene as the host single crystal. This method could also control energy and polarization transfer by using green-emitting and red-emitting guest.

Additionally, the researchers successfully fabricated high-polarized organic light-emitting diodes (WOPESSCs-OPLEDs) with small pixel size down to 30 μm using a developed mask-free fabrication technique. The WOPESSCs-OPLEDs demonstrated bright, uniform white light with high DOP of 0.91 and dynamic control over the emission intensity.

Further investigation revealed that WOPESSCs, combining superior integrated optoelectronic properties, also show promising applications in organic light-emitting transistors (OLETs) that integrate OLED and organic field-effect transistor (OFET) functions. These OLETs offer high charge mobility, strong emission, and the ability to adjust the electroluminescent color via gate voltage, expanding possibilities for dynamic multicolor displays and lighting applications.

This study was published in Nature Photonics (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-024-01609-6).

Design concept and polarized light-emitting devices of WOPESSCs (Image by QIN Zhengsheng)

Contact:

Prof. DONG Huanli

Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Email: dhl522@iccas.ac.cn