Zheng-Hong Lu and co-workers, University of Toronto, Canada, have found a simple method to make organic light-emitting diode (OLED) devices simpler and improve their efficiency: They add a one-atom thick sheet of chlorine onto the surface of indium tin oxide (ITO), the current industry-standard electrode material found in flat-panel displays.

Traditional OLED efficiency decreases at very high brightness, but the chlorinated OLEDs had over twice the efficiency of their non-chlorinated counterparts at high brightness. Additionally, use of chlorinated ITO eliminated the need for several stacked layers found in traditional OLEDs. This reduces the number of manufacturing steps and equipment and represents a large potential saving in production costs.

• Chlorinated Indium Tin Oxide Electrodes with High Work Function for Organic Device Compatibility
  M. G. Helander, Z. B. Wang, J. Qiu, M. T. Greiner, D. P. Puzzo, Z. W. Liu, Z. H. Lu,
  Science 2011.
  DOI: 10.1126/science.1202992