Pushing the conductance and transparency limit of monolayer graphene electrodes for flexible organic light-emitting diodes

Lai Peng Ma, Zhongbin Wu, Lichang Yin, Dingdong Zhang, Shichao Dong, Qing Zhang, Mao Lin Chen, Wei Ma, Zhibin Zhang, Jinhong Du, Dong Ming Sun, Kaihui Liu, Xiangfeng Duan, Dongge Ma, Hui Ming Cheng, Wencai Ren

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

40 Scopus citations

Abstract

Graphene has emerged as an attractive candidate for flexible transparent electrode (FTE) for a new generation of flexible optoelectronics. Despite tremendous potential and broad earlier interest, the promise of graphene FTE has been plagued by the intrinsic trade-off between electrical conductance and transparency with a figure of merit (σDC/σOp) considerably lower than that of the state-of-the-art ITO electrodes (σDC/σOp <123 for graphene vs. ~240 for ITO). Here we report a synergistic electrical/optical modulation strategy to simultaneously boost the conductance and transparency. We show that a tetrakis(pentafluorophenyl)boric acid (HTB) coating can function as highly effective hole doping layer to increase the conductance of monolayer graphene by sevenfold and at the same time as an antireflective layer to boost the visible transmittance to 98.8%. Such simultaneous improvement in conductance and transparency breaks previous limit in graphene FTEs and yields an unprecedented figure of merit (σDC/σOp ~323) that rivals the best commercial ITO electrode. Using the tailored monolayer graphene as the flexible anode, we further demonstrate high-performance green organic lightemitting diodes (OLEDs) with the maximum current, power and external quantum efficiencies (111.4 cd A-1, 124.9 lm W-1and 29.7%) outperforming all comparable flexible OLEDs and surpassing that with standard rigid ITO by 43%. This study defines a straightforward pathway to tailor optoelectronic properties of monolayer graphene and to fully capture their potential as a generational FTE for flexible optoelectronics.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)25991-25998
Number of pages8
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume117
Issue number42
DOIs
StatePublished - 20 Oct 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Antireflection
  • Doping
  • Flexible optoelectronics
  • Graphene
  • Transparent electrode

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