Improvement of rare-earth complex electroluminescence by using organic–inorganic heterostructure

A new organic–inorganic heterostructure device was designed. The wide gap semiconductor ZnS was acted as an electron transporting, electron acceleration and hole blocking layer. The combined structure of organic/inorganic device has three distinguished advantages: (i) avoid these uncontrolled phenomena on organic material interfaces; (ii) increase the energy and number of injected electrons into ploy (N-vinyl-carbazole) PVK (iii) enhance hole-current density by the increase of the electric field strength in PVK due to a high dielectric constant material ZnS as an electron transporting layer. Characteristic emissions of complex of terbium ion with o-benzoylbenzoate ion and 1, 10-phenathroline (Tb(o-BBA)3(phen)) based on organic–inorganic heterostructure device were obtained. The maximum EL intensity was improved more than three times and reached to 326 cdm−2 compared with the pure organic electroluminescence device.