Nanoparticle-Enhanced Silver-Nanowire Plasmonic Electrodes for High-Performance Organic Optoelectronic Devices

Taehyo Kim; Saewon Kang; Jungwoo Heo; Seungse Cho; Jae Won Kim; Ayoung Choe; Bright Walker; Ravi Shanker; Hyunhyub Ko; Jin Young Kim

doi:10.1002/adma.201800659

Nanoparticle-Enhanced Silver-Nanowire Plasmonic Electrodes for High-Performance Organic Optoelectronic Devices

Adv Mater. 2018 Jul;30(28):e1800659. doi: 10.1002/adma.201800659. Epub 2018 May 21.

Authors

Taehyo Kim¹, Saewon Kang¹, Jungwoo Heo^{1

2}, Seungse Cho¹, Jae Won Kim¹, Ayoung Choe¹, Bright Walker³, Ravi Shanker¹, Hyunhyub Ko¹, Jin Young Kim^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Energy Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, 44919, South Korea.
² Department of physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, 44919, South Korea.
³ Department of Chemistry, Kyung Hee University, 126 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 02447, South Korea.

PMID: 29782678
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201800659

Abstract

Improved performance in plasmonic organic solar cells (OSCs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) via strong plasmon-coupling effects generated by aligned silver nanowire (AgNW) transparent electrodes decorated with core-shell silver-silica nanoparticles (Ag@SiO₂ NPs) is demonstrated. NP-enhanced plasmonic AgNW (Ag@SiO₂ NP-AgNW) electrodes enable substantially enhanced radiative emission and light absorption efficiency due to strong hybridized plasmon coupling between localized surface plasmons (LSPs) and propagating surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) modes, which leads to improved device performance in organic optoelectronic devices (OODs). The discrete dipole approximation (DDA) calculation of the electric field verifies a strongly enhanced plasmon-coupling effect caused by decorating core-shell Ag@SiO₂ NPs onto the AgNWs. Notably, an electroluminescence efficiency of 25.33 cd A^-1 (at 3.2 V) and a power efficiency of 25.14 lm W^-1 (3.0 V) in OLEDs, as well as a power conversion efficiency (PCE) value of 9.19% in OSCs are achieved using hybrid Ag@SiO₂ NP-AgNW films. These are the highest values reported to date for optoelectronic devices based on AgNW electrodes. This work provides a new design platform to fabricate high-performance OODs, which can be further explored in various plasmonic and optoelectronic devices.

Keywords: gap plasmons; nanoparticle-nanowire junctions; organic light-emitting diodes; organic solar cells; silver nanowire networks.