Circularly polarized OLEDs from chiral plasmonic nanoparticle-molecule hybrids

Abstract Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) supporting the direct emission of circularly polarized (CP) light are essential for numerous technologies. The realization of CP-OLEDs with large dissymmetry ( g EL ) factors and high external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) has been accepted as a considerable challenge. Here we demonstrate the realization of efficient CP-OLEDs based on the assembly of chiral plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) and supramolecular aggregates. The chiral plasmonic NPs serve as the chiral scaffold and chiral optical nanoantenna to modulate the circularly polarized absorption and emission of the supramolecular chromophores. We employ different chiral plasmonic NPs to construct various CP-OLEDs with the emission dominated by chiral excitons or chiral plasmons. The CP-OLED showing a high EQE of 2.5% and a large g EL factor of 0.31 is achieved, as a result of multiscale chirality transfer, plasmonic enhancement, and the suppression of the overshoot effect. The proposed schemes are compatible with the current manufacturing technology of OLEDs. This work demonstrates that chiral plasmonic NPs can be promising candidates in chiral photoelectric devices.