Identifying and reducing interfacial losses to enhance color-pure electroluminescence in blue-emitting perovskite nanoplatelet light-emitting diodes

TL;DR

This study identifies interfacial barriers as a key factor limiting blue perovskite nanoplatelet LED efficiency and demonstrates that poly(triarylamine) interlayers can significantly improve external quantum efficiency.

Contribution

It reveals the deep ionization potentials of NPls cause hole-injection barriers and shows that interlayers can reduce non-radiative losses, boosting LED efficiency.

Findings

EQE increased to 0.3% with interlayer

Further increased to 0.55% in thicker NPls

Deep ionization potentials hinder hole injection

Abstract

Perovskite nanoplatelets (NPls) hold great promise for light-emitting applications, having achieved high photoluminescence quantum efficiencies (PLQEs) approaching unity in the blue wavelength range, where other metal-halide perovskites have typically been ineffective. However, the external quantum efficiency (EQE) of blue-emitting NPl light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have only reached 0.12%, with typical values well below 0.1%. In this work, we show that the performance of NPl LEDs is primarily hindered by a poor electronic interface between the emitter and hole-injector. Through Kelvin Probe and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy measurements, we reveal that the NPls have remarkably deep ionization potentials (>=6.5 eV), leading to large barriers for hole injection, as well as substantial non-radiative decay at the interface between the emitter and hole-injector. We find that an effective way to reduce these non-radiative losses is by using poly(triarylamine) interlayers. This results in an increase in the EQE of our blue LEDs emitting at 464 nm wavelength to 0.3%. We find that our results can be generalized to thicker sky-blue-emitting NPls, where we increase the EQE to 0.55% using the poly(triarylamine) interlayer. Our work also identifies the key challenges for further efficiency increases.