Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are finding applications in a whole range of devices now not least because of their flexibility, in both the physical and viability sense, and their high energy efficiency. Until recently, however, OLED research was focused on visible emission. Now, US scientists have developed a near infra-red OLED, a NIR OLED. They reckon an NIR OLED could be used in future night-vision devices. NIR OLEDs might also one day find use in small-scale, portable NIR spectrometers or lab-on-a-chip systems for medical and environmental analysis, or potentially chemical and bio weapons detection.
Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California and colleagues at Princeton University, Steve Forrest’s group at the University of Michigan, and Julie Brown’s team at Universal Display Corporation have used a phosphorescent platinum-porphyrin complex as a doping agent to create the new class of NIR OLED.
You can read the full story in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week.
If anyone gets the allusion in this post title, drop me a line.