University of Michigan engineers have found that the light in OLED displays comes from nanoscale hotspots—some of which flicker—rather than from a perfectly uniform surface, a behavior that could shorten device lifespans by causing certain areas to carry more current and burn out faster. The studysuggests that these uneven emission patterns may also affect the performance of organic electronics such as solar cells and transistors. As a potential fix, researchers propose using crystalline instead of amorphous structures to improve durability. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and Universal Display Corp.

Charge rivers in hilly OLED energy landscapes

“The calculations that motivated us to look for this are actually pretty old. In the mid-2000s, people were predicting what they called a current channeling phenomenon,” said Chris Giebink, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and also senior author of the study. “You could liken it to a hilly landscape. The electrons, or charge carriers, that move through the device tend to want to follow the lowest energy pathways, so they’ll travel along the valleys.”

Charge carriers come in two flavors, electrons and positively charged “holes,” which run in opposite directions through the landscape. Where those rivers cross, light-emitting molecules convert electron-hole pairs into photons, or particles of light.

Because some valleys are deeper than others, they tend to support high-traffic rivers of charge carriers, with densities that are thought to be 10 to 100 times higher than the rest of the material. In contrast, crystalline materials are more uniform. Their landscape is flatter, leading the charge carriers to spread out more evenly, reducing the hotspot effect.

Spotting nanoscale hotspots with superresolution

Theory suggests that the hotspots are just a few tens of nanometers across. They appear as graininess in images from an optical microscope, which is limited to details of a couple hundred nanometers or bigger. 

“An initial concern was whether we were seeing a microscope artifact,” said Joshua Springsteen, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering and first author of the study. “We examined the same area of the device with our microscope using both photoluminescence and electroluminescence, confirming that it was an electrical phenomenon.”

Because some of the lights flicker and aren’t always in sync, Springsteen could take a video of the device and run it through software that keyed in on the changes in brightness when one hotspot switched off while another stayed on. This technique, called superresolution optical fluctuation imaging, helped the team confirm that the hotspots were smaller than half the wavelength of the green light they emitted.

The researchers believe the blinking is due to charge carriers that are temporarily trapped in dips in the energy landscape. When that happens, they act more like dams, repelling other charge carriers, which seek alternate routes and cause downstream hotspots to go dark. Eventually, the charge carrier absorbs enough heat to pop back out of the dip, and the original hotspot lights up again. Because the flickering hotspots aren’t in sync, the human eye perceives amorphous OLEDs as glowing steadily.

To confirm that they had the mechanism right, the team used those earlier calculations that showed where charge-carrier rivers flow and meet. Springsteen took these theoretical freeze-frames and processed them to mimic the way the hotspots would have been blurred by the superresolution microscopy technique they used. These modified modeling images resembled the experimental images well enough that the team is confident they were seeing the hotspots.

The device was built in the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility and studied at the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization, both of which are operated and maintained with support from indirect cost allocations in federal grants.

For more information:  Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

Image: Hotspots appear in an optical microscope image examining the surface of a green OLED, processed to quantify brightness. These hotspots may limit the lifetimes of amorphous OLEDs. Image: Joshua Springsteen, Optoelectronic Components and Materials Group, University of Michigan.

MIT physicists have used a new imaging technique to observe terahertz-frequency vibrations—described as quantum “jiggles”—inside a superconducting fluid for the first time, revealing behavior that was previously undetectable. By shining terahertz light, which probes matter differently than optical, infrared or X-ray wavelengths, the team captured inherent quantum motions within the material, opening a new window into the fundamental properties of superconductors.

Terahertz light is a form of energy that lies between microwaves and infrared radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum. It oscillates over a trillion times per second — just the right pace to match how atoms and electrons naturally vibrate inside materials. Ideally, this makes terahertz light the perfect tool to probe these motions.

But while the frequency is right, the wavelength — the distance over which the wave repeats in space — is not. Terahertz waves have wavelengths hundreds of microns long. Because the smallest spot that any kind of light can be focused into is limited by its wavelength, terahertz beams cannot be tightly confined. As a result, a focused terahertz beam is physically too large to interact effectively with microscopic samples, simply washing over these tiny structures without revealing fine detail.

The scientists report that they have developed a new terahertz microscope that compresses terahertz light down to microscopic dimensions. This pinpoint of terahertz light can resolve quantum details in materials that were previously inaccessible.

The team used the new microscope to send terahertz light into a sample of bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, or BSCCO (pronounced “BIS-co”) — a material that superconducts at relatively high temperatures. With the terahertz scope, the team observed a frictionless “superfluid” of superconducting electrons that were collectively jiggling back and forth at terahertz frequencies within the BSCCO material.

“This new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before,” says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT.

By using terahertz light to probe BSCCO and other superconductors, scientists can gain a better understanding of properties that could lead to long-coveted room-temperature superconductors. The new microscope can also help to identify materials that emit and receive terahertz radiation. Such materials could be the foundation of future wireless, terahertz-based communications, that could potentially transmit more data at faster rates compared to today’s microwave-based communications.

“There’s a huge push to take Wi-Fi or telecommunications to the next level, to terahertz frequencies,” says Alexander von Hoegen, a postdoc in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and lead author of the study. “If you have a terahertz microscope, you could study how terahertz light interacts with microscopically small devices that could serve as future antennas or receivers.”

In addition to Gedik and von Hoegen, the study’s MIT co-authors include Tommy Tai, Clifford Allington, Matthew Yeung, Jacob Pettine, Alexander Kossak, Byunghun Lee, and Geoffrey Beach, along with collaborators at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Brookhaven National Lab.

Hitting a limit

Terahertz light is a promising yet largely untapped imaging tool. It occupies a unique spectral “sweet spot”: Like microwaves, radio waves, and visible light, terahertz radiation is nonionizing and therefore does not carry enough energy to cause harmful radiation effects, making it safe for use in humans and biological tissues. At the same time, much like X-rays, terahertz waves can penetrate a wide range of materials, including fabric, wood, cardboard, plastic, ceramics, and even thin brick walls.

Owing to these distinctive properties, terahertz light is being actively explored for applications in security screening, medical imaging, and wireless communications. In contrast, far less effort has been devoted to applying terahertz radiation to microscopy and the illumination of microscopic phenomena. The primary reason is a fundamental limitation shared by all forms of light: the diffraction limit, which restricts spatial resolution to roughly the wavelength of the radiation used.

With wavelengths on the order of hundreds of microns, terahertz radiation is far larger than atoms, molecules, and many other microscopic structures. As a result, its ability to directly resolve microscale features is fundamentally constrained.

“Our main motivation is this problem that, you might have a 10-micron sample, but your terahertz light has a 100-micron wavelength, so what you would mostly be measuring is air, or the vacuum around your sample,” von Hoegen explains. “You would be missing all these quantum phases that have characteristic fingerprints in the terahertz regime.”

Zooming in

The team found a way around the terahertz diffraction limit by using spintronic emitters — a recent technology that produces sharp pulses of terahertz light. Spintronic emitters are made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers. When a laser illuminates the multilayered structure, the light triggers a cascade of effects in the electrons within each layer, such that the structure ultimately emits a pulse of energy at terahertz frequencies.

By holding a sample close to the emitter, the team trapped the terahertz light before it had a chance to spread, essentially squeezing it into a space much smaller than its wavelength. In this regime, the light can bypass the diffraction limit to resolve features that were previously too small to see.

The MIT team adapted this technology to observe microscopic, quantum-scale phenomena. For their new study, the team developed a terahertz microscope using spintronic emitters interfaced with a Bragg mirror. This multilayered structure of reflective films successively filters out certain, undesired wavelengths of light while letting through others, protecting the sample from the “harmful” laser which triggers the terahertz emission.

As a demonstration, the team used the new microscope to image a small, atomically thin sample of BSCCO. They placed the sample very close to the terahertz source and imaged it at temperatures close to absolute zero — cold enough for the material to become a superconductor. To create the image, they scanned the laser beam, sending terahertz light through the sample and looking for the specific signatures left by the superconducting electrons.

“We see the terahertz field gets dramatically distorted, with little oscillations following the main pulse,” von Hoegen says. “That tells us that something in the sample is emitting terahertz light, after it got kicked by our initial terahertz pulse.”

With further analysis, the team concluded that the terahertz microscope was observing the natural, collective terahertz oscillations of superconducting electrons within the material.

“It’s this superconducting gel that we’re sort of seeing jiggle,” von Hoegen says.

This jiggling superfluid was expected, but never directly visualized until now. The team is now applying the microscope to other two-dimensional materials, where they hope to capture more terahertz phenomena.

“There are a lot of the fundamental excitations, like lattice vibrations and magnetic processes, and all these collective modes that happen at terahertz frequencies,” von Hoegen says. “We can now resonantly zoom in on these interesting physics with our terahertz microscope.”

For more information: Nature