Emissive amorphous materials

We now describe the current techniques of deposition. A coating process involves several parameters. There is the nature of the substrate a crystal or an amorphous material, the quality of its polishing and its temperature. There are also the characteristics of the source, as temperature and emission law, and those of the medium in between, as its pressure and composition. In evaporation process the energy of particles is 0.1 eV, or 1100 K their impact velocity is in the range of m.s . With sputtering techniques, the energy lies in between 10-50 eV and the impact velocity is in the range of km.s . ... 

Optical absorption and recombination processes involve two or more particles and so may include correlation effects. Electron-hole pairs form excitons in a crystal, with the result that the absorption and emission spectra are not described by the one-particle density of states distributions. Although excitons can exist in an amorphous material (see Chapter 3), they are not detected in the optical spectra and the absorption is described by the convolution of the one-particle densities of valence and conduction band states. The correlation effects in... 

PBD may exhibit short operating lifetimes due to recrystallization or aggregate formation. This leads to phase separation and formation of charge carrier traps that inhibit the desired emission. Therefore, it has been proposed to bond the PBD electron transporting structure to a polymer chain, which results in amorphous materials. Eor example, poly(methyl... 

Amorphous carbon (a-C) films have a uniquely intrinsic stress ( 12 GPa) that is almost one order of magnitude higher than those found in other amorphous materials such as fl-Si, a-Ge, or metals (<1 GPa) [98]. Applying pressiue to a material, one can modify its electronic properties, e.g., band structure, resistivity, work function, due to the stress [99]. Poa et al. [98, 100] found a correlation between the stress and the threshold field for electron emission, as shown in Fig. 16.14. 

In Figure 5, the normalized emission spectra of the two solid hybrid materials, GFP/SBA-15 and GFP/Aerosil , are reported. The shape of the emission profile for GFP/SBA-15 follows closely that of the GFP in buffer solution, whereas the photoemission intensity of GFP/Aerosil is one order of magnitude lower and slightly different in its tale shape (spectra at the actual intensities not reported). This reduction in intensity could be explained by a multilayer arrangement of the protein molecules on the amorphous nanoparticles, which would explain both the difference in emission spectra ("self-quenching effect") and the difference in adsorption amount shown above. 

Bis(dimesitylboryl)-2,2 -bithiophene (BMB-2T, 242) forms a stable amorphous glass and emits pure blue color with a high fluorescence QE of 86% in THF solution [270]. However, an OLED with ITO/m-MTDATA/TPD/BMB-2T/Mg Ag emits with a broad emission due to an exciplex with TPD. The exciplex can be prevented by insertion of a thin layer of 1,3,5-tris(biphenyl-4-yl)benzene (TBB) between TPD and BMB-2T, leading to a pure blue emission. It seems that the boron complex or boron-containing compounds easily form an exciplex with common HTMs. Other similar blue emitter materials also demonstrate such behavior. 

When working with metal electrodes, the energy of the electrons in the metal is lower than the vacuum level by the work function of the metal, which tends to be 3-5 eV. Work functions of some materials relevant to LED devices are collected in Table 10.2 [11]. The work function can vary depending upon the crystal facet from which emission is measured (or if the metal is amorphous), and sample preparation details. The photoelectric (PE) effect is exploited in XPS (ESCA) or UPS to measure the work function. It is very critical to realize that, in these experiments, what is measured is the energy required to remove an electron to a point just outside the surface of the solid, not to infinity. At this range, the dipolar forces at the surface are still active, and one can learn about surface dipoles in the material. 

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