Narrow Bandwidth Top-Emitting OLEDs Designed for Rhodamine 6G Excitation in Biological Sensing Applications

Organic light emitting diodes (OLED) are promising candidates offering in optical sensor applications to detect different gas compositions and excitable optical marker groups in chemical and biological processes. They enable attractive solutions for monitoring the gas phase composition of e.g., dissolved molecular oxygen (O2) species in bio reactors or excitation of fluorescent markers. In this work, we investigate different OLED devices for biomedical applications to excite the fluorescent dye rhodamine 6G (R6G). The OLED devices are built in top emission geometry comprising a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) acting as optical mirror. The OLED is optimized to provide a very narrow emission characteristic to excite the R6G at 530 nm wavelength and enabling the possibility to minimize the optical crosstalk between the OLED electroluminescence and the fluorescence of R6G. The DBR includes a thin film encapsulation and enables the narrowing of the spectral emission band depending on the number of DBR pairs. The comparison between optical simulation data and experimental results exhibits good agreement and proves process stability. OPEN ACCESS Electronics 2015, 4 983