Scientific progress is like a relay race where each new advancement builds on the work of others. Over the years, many discoveries and technologies have made significant strides forward in our journey of understanding. Some of this work is recognized each year with the announcement of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine. Though it is impossible to recognize every critical, deserving innovator and idea, the CAS Science Team has identified a number of discoveries with the potential to provide extensive benefits to the scientific community and the broader world. Could one of them be the next Nobel winner?

Today, OLEDs are appearing everywhere on phones, media players, portable gaming systems, lighting, and even car radios. The technology is credited to chemists Ching Wan Tang and Steven Van Slyke for pioneering the first practical OLED device in 1987 while working at Eastman Kodak. This has paved the way for a new generation of display technologies across industries.

An Organic Light-Emitting Diode is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light in response to an electric current. This organic layer is situated between two electrodes; typically, at least one of these electrodes is transparent. Due to their lightweight nature, they can be fabricated on flexible plastic substrates, have better picture quality, and can be printed onto any suitable substrate by an inkjet printer.

CAS has indexed over 113,000 documents related to OLEDs across multiple areas of application since Tang and Van Slyke’s first practical device in 1987. With 30,000 journals and 80,000 patents, this illustrates their central importance in technological development.

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Photo credits: © Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Wed. 13 Sep 2023.