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.