Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have attracted much attention in research and industry thanks to their capability to emit light with high efficiency and to deliver high-quality white light that provides good color rendering. OLEDs feature homogeneous large area emission and can be produced on flexible substrates. In terms of efficiency, OLEDs can compete with highly efficient conventional light sources but their efficiency typically decreases at high brightness levels, an effect known as efficiency roll-off. In recent years, much effort has been undertaken to understand the underlying processes and to develop methods that improve the high-brightness performance of OLEDs. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge and provide a detailed description of the relevant principles, both for phosphorescent and fluorescent emitter molecules. In particular, we focus on exciton-quenching mechanisms, such as triplet-triplet annihilation, quenching by polarons, or field-induced quenching, but also discuss mechanisms such as changes in charge carrier balance. We further review methods that may reduce the roll-off and thus enable OLEDs to be used in high-brightness applications.

Organic dyes have been used as gain medium for lasers since the 1960s, long before the advent of today's organic electronic devices. Organic gain materials are highly attractive for lasing due to their chemical tunability and large stimulated emission cross section. While the traditional dye laser has been largely replaced by solid-state lasers, a number of new and miniaturized organic lasers have emerged that hold great potential for lab-on-chip applications, biointegration, low-cost sensing and related areas, which benefit from the unique properties of organic gain materials. On the fundamental level, these include high exciton binding energy, low refractive index (compared to inorganic semiconductors), and ease of spectral and chemical tuning. On a technological level, mechanical flexibility and compatibility with simple processing techniques such as printing, roll-to-roll, self-assembly, and soft-lithography are most relevant. Here, the authors provide a comprehensive review of the developments in the field over the past decade, discussing recent advances in organic gain materials, which are today often based on solid-state organic semiconductors, as well as optical feedback structures, and device fabrication. Recent efforts toward continuous wave operation and electrical pumping of solid-state organic lasers are reviewed, and new device concepts and emerging applications are summarized.

White organic light-emitting diodes (WOLEDs) offer a range of attractive characteristics and are in several regards conceptually different from most currently used light sources. From an application perspective, their advantages include a high power efficiency that rivals the performance of fluorescent lamps and inorganic LEDs and the potential for a very low cost of manufacturing. As flat-panel light sources they are intrinsically glare-free and generate light over a large area. WOLEDs are constantly improving in terms of performance, durability, and manufacturability, but these improvements require joint research efforts in chemistry and the materials sciences to design better materials as well as in physics and engineering to invent new device concepts and design suitable fabrication schemes, a process that has generated many exciting scientific questions and answers. This article reviews current developments in the field of WOLEDs and puts a special focus on new device concepts and on approaches to reliable and cost-efficient WOLED manufacturing.

In recent years there have been significant advances in the size and characteristics of small lasers, i.e. lasers with dimensions or modes sizes close to or smaller than the wavelength of emitted light. This work has primarily been led by innovative use of new materials and cavity designs. This article reviews some of the latest developments, particularly in metallic and plasmonic lasers, improvements in small dielectric lasers, and the emerging area of small bio-compatible/bioderived lasers. We examine the different approaches employed in small lasers to reduce size and how they lead to significant differences , particularly between metal and dielectric cavity lasers. We present potential applications for the various forms of small lasers and indicate where further developments are required.

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Microcavities filled with biologically produced green fluorescent protein show polariton condensation at room temperature.

The first full‐color polymer organic light‐emitting diode (OLED) display is reported, fabricated by a direct photolithography process, that is, a process that allows direct structuring of the electroluminescent layer of the OLED by exposure to UV light. The required photosensitivity is introduced by attaching oxetane side groups to the backbone of red‐, green‐, and blue‐light‐emitting polymers. This allows for the use of photolithography to selectively crosslink thin films of these polymers. Hence the solution‐based process requires neither an additional etching step, as is the case for conventional photoresist lithography, nor does it rely on the use of prestructured substrates, which are required if ink‐jet printing is used to pixilate the emissive layer. The process allows for low‐cost display fabrication without sacrificing resolution: Structures with features in the range of 2 μm are obtained by patterning the emitting polymers via UV illumination through an ultrafine shadow mask. Compared to state‐of‐the‐art fluorescent OLEDs, the display prototype (pixel size 200 μm × 600 μm) presented here shows very good efficiency as well as good color saturation for all three colors. The application in solid‐state lighting is also possible: Pure white light [Commision Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE) values of 0.33, 0.33 and color rendering index (CRI) of 76] is obtained at an efficiency of 5 cd A–1 by mixing the three colors in the appropriate ratio. For further enhancement of the device efficiency, an additional hole‐transport layer (HTL), which is also photo‐crosslinkable and therefore suitable to fabricate multilayer devices from solution, is embedded between the anode and the electroluminescent layer.

High-efficiency white OLEDs fabricated on silver nanowire-based composite transparent electrodes show almost perfectly Lambertian emission and superior angular color stability, imparted by electrode light scattering. The OLED efficiencies are comparable to those fabricated using indium tin oxide. The transparent electrodes are fully solution-processable, thin-film compatible, and have a figure of merit suitable for large-area devices.