Chlorobenzene-treated carbon nanotubes in a dielectric layer and their impact on inorganic electroluminescence

Abstract We investigated alternating current driven inorganic electroluminescence (EL) devices, in which chlorobenzene (CB) treated carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were incorporated within the dielectric layer. The devices having CB-treated CNTs exhibited better performance than the reference device without CNTs. Especially, 0.01 wt% of CB-treated CNTs yielded the best results—an enhancement of up to 50% in the luminance, along with a 30% reduction in the current density compared with the reference one. The improvement in EL performance was attributed to the enhanced dielectric constant of the dielectric layer by inclusion of CB-treated CNTs. This is considered to arise from the combined effect of the micro-capacitors from numerous CNTs in the dielectric layer and the interfacial polarization from the C Cl bonds originating from the CB treatment. In addition, it is essential to control the concentration of CNTs low enough to prevent leakage current paths by percolation, here, 0.01 wt% sufficed this condition. Thus, incorporating CB-treated CNTs into the dielectric layer improved the characteristics of the EL devices, which would be considered as a candidate for future display applications.