Theoretical study of the influence of salt doping in the functioning of OLEDs

Abstract

One of the strategies to improve the efficiency of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) is to dope the active organic semiconducting layer with inorganic salts, leading to the development of a hybrid organic/inorganic hetero-structure. However, it is hard to know from the experiments how each one of the electronic processes underlying the functioning of OLEDs is affected by the accumulation of inorganic ions of different sign at both organic/electrode interfaces. In order to assess these effects, we performed computer simulations by using a multi-scale model that combines quantum molecular dynamics calculations at the atomistic scale with Monte Carlo calculations at the mesoscopic scale. We focus our attention on the main differences obtained between doped and pristine organic layers, when bipolar charge injection occurs. Our results show a significant drop on the turn-on applied electric field while maintaining rapid response to the applied field as well as a clear increase in recombination rate and recombination efficiency far from the electrodes for the doped situation, which are responsible for the dramatic improvement of doped OLED performance found in the experiments.