Zinc oxide nanocrystals as electron injecting building blocks for plastic light sources

Hybrid inorganic-organic light emitting devices (HyLEDs) employing ZnO nanocrystals as one of their metal oxide contacts lead to very bright devices on plastic substrates with performances superior to those obtained from the rigid counterparts employing planar films of bulk ZnO. The superior performance is related to the increase in the bandgap of the ZnO nanocrystals caused by quantum confinement effects. We demonstrate that this effect diminishes with increasing annealing temperature of the ZnO nanocrystal layer due to a gradual decrease of the bandgap towards the bulk ZnO value. Therefore, best performances were obtained with room temperature processing of the ZnO nanocrystals.