Donal Bradley

Abstract:

We have studied the electrical properties of a fluorene-containing copolymer which is currently being developed for state-of-the-art blue polymer LEDs. This copolymer is made up of three functional groups which are nominally the hole-conducting, electron conducting and emissive regions. Using a combination of current/voltage, time-of-flight and dark injection transient versus temperature measurements, the injection and transport properties of the material have been investigated, Hole injection from polystyrene sulphonate doped polyethylenedioxythiophene (PEDOT:PSS) into the polymer is found to be consistent with an ohmic contact. Hole transport within the fluorene copolymer is found to possess a mobility that is two orders of magnitude lower than that for previously studied polymers containing the copolymer constituents. Using the equations for trap-free space-charge limited current, predicted J/V characteristics have been obtained from the mobility values derived using the time-of-flight technique, We discuss both the reduced hole mobility of the copolymer, und the discrepancies between the measured and predicted J/V characteristics, in terms of variations in both the trap and transport site densities and their energetic and spatial distributions.

Abstract:

Femtosecond electric-field-assisted pump-probe measurements are a new approach to the study of fundamental processes within organic optoelectronic devices. Here we report a detailed study of organic light-emitting diodes based on poly(9,9-dioctylfluorene), using both temporal and spectral information to investigate polaron generation, due to field-induced singlet dissociation, and their subsequent recombination. The fundamental event in electroluminescence is time resolved: we find that initially free polarons coalesce into intermediate pairs of both singlets and triplets multiplicity which subsequently decay into the neutral state. Our results indicate that the efficiency of singlet formation, beta approximately 0.7, is much higher than expected from simple state degeneracy arguments (beta approximately 0.25).