Plasmonic enhancement of stability and brightness in organic light-emitting devices.

The field of plasmonics, which studies the resonant interactions of electromagnetic waves and free electrons in solid-state materials, has yet to be put to large-scale commercial application owing to the large amount of loss that usually occurs in plasmonic materials. Organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) have been incorporated into billions of commercial products because of their good colour saturation, versatile form factor and low power consumption, but could still be improved in terms of efficiency and stability. Although OLEDs incorporating organic phosphors achieve an internal charge-to-light conversion of unity, their refractive index contrast reduces the observable fraction of photons outside the device to around 25 per cent.

Methods for Conducting Electron Backscattered Diffraction (EBSD) on Polycrystalline Organic Molecular Thin Films.

Electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) is a technique regularly used to obtain crystallographic information from inorganic samples. When EBSD is acquired simultaneously with emitting diodes data, a sample can be thoroughly characterized both structurally and compositionally. For organic materials, coherent Kikuchi patterns do form when the electron beam interacts with crystalline material.

Erratum: Corrigendum: Beating the thermodynamic limit with photo-activation of n-doping in organic semiconductors.

Nature Materials 16, 1209-1215 (2017); published online 13 November 2017; corrected after print 15 December 2017. In the version of this Article originally published, the source of 'ZADN' stated in the Methods should have read 'obtained as free research samples from Guangzhou ChinaRay OptoelectronicMaterials' instead of 'China-Ray'.

Corrigendum: Beating the thermodynamic limit with photo-activation of n-doping in organic semiconductors.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nmat5027.

Beating the thermodynamic limit with photo-activation of n-doping in organic semiconductors.

Chemical doping of organic semiconductors using molecular dopants plays a key role in the fabrication of efficient organic electronic devices. Although a variety of stable molecular p-dopants have been developed and successfully deployed in devices in the past decade, air-stable molecular n-dopants suitable for materials with low electron affinity are still elusive. Here we demonstrate that photo-activation of a cleavable air-stable dimeric dopant can result in kinetically stable and efficient n-doping of host semiconductors, whose reduction potentials are beyond the thermodynamic reach of the dimer's effective reducing strength.

Homoepitaxy of Crystalline Rubrene Thin Films.

The smooth surface of crystalline rubrene films formed through an abrupt heating process provides a valuable platform to study organic homoepitaxy. By varying growth rate and substrate temperature, we are able to manipulate the onset of a transition from layer-by-layer to island growth modes, while the crystalline thin films maintain a remarkably smooth surface (less than 2.3 nm root-mean-square roughness) even with thick (80 nm) adlayers.