1. Laboratory of Organic Optoelectronics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
2. Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
3. These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence to: Vladimir Bulovi¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to V.B. (e-mail: Email: bulovic@mit.edu).

Abstract

The integration of organic and inorganic materials at the nanometre scale into hybrid optoelectronic structures enables active devices^{1, 2, 3} that combine the diversity of organic materials with the high-performance electronic and optical properties of inorganic nanocrystals⁴. The optimization of such hybrid devices ultimately depends upon the precise positioning of the functionally distinct materials. Previous studies^{5, 6} have already emphasized that this is a challenge, owing to the lack of well-developed nanometre-scale fabrication techniques. Here we demonstrate a hybrid light-emitting diode (LED) that combines the ease of processability of organic materials with the narrow-band, efficient luminescence of colloidal quantum dots⁷ (QDs). To isolate the luminescence processes from charge conduction, we fabricate a quantum-dot LED (QD-LED) that contains only a single monolayer of QDs, sandwiched between two organic thin films. This is achieved by a method that uses material phase segregation between the QD aliphatic capping groups and the aromatic organic materials. In our devices, where QDs function exclusively as lumophores, we observe a 25-fold improvement in luminescence efficiency (1.6 cd A^-1 at 2,000 cd m^-2) over the best previous QD-LED results⁵. The reproducibility and precision of our phase-segregation approach suggests that this technique could be widely applicable to the fabrication of other hybrid organic/inorganic devices.

1. Laboratory of Organic Optoelectronics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
2. Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
3. These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence to: Vladimir Bulovi¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to V.B. (e-mail: Email: bulovic@mit.edu).