Organic spacers improve LED performance

A team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories has demonstrated that the choice of organic spacer significantly impacts LED performance.

By using organic spacers with atoms arranged in a ring instead of a linear chain, the scientists increased device efficiency by two orders of magnitude (to around 12 percent) and brightness by 70 times, with a luminance approaching that of typical green organic LEDs.

"The large organic spacers slice the 3-D perovskite crystal lattice into a 2-D layered structure consisting of graphene-like atomic sheets each less than a billionth-of-a-meter thick," explained Wanyi Nie, a scientist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) at Los Alamos.