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Plasmon-enhanced ultralow-threshold solid-state triplet fusion upconversion

Nature Photonics volume 20, pages 24–30 (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Triplet fusion upconversion has potential applications in solar cells, photoredox catalysis, additive manufacturing and bioimaging. However, solid-state upconversion systems have struggled to measure up to their solution-phase counterparts, often requiring enormous optical power densities to operate at the maximum efficiency. Here we substantially improve the performance of upconversion films through excitation with surface plasmons that propagate along a planar silver-film interface, leading to an absorption enhancement that reduces the intensity threshold Ith by a factor of 19 and enhances the external quantum efficiency by a factor of 17. From this, we achieve Ith values as low as 3.4 mW cm−2 and an external quantum efficiency up to 0.094%. To demonstrate real-world viability, we couple the upconversion film to plasmons generated by the near-field of excitons in an organic light-emitting diode. This scheme is then used to fabricate a white-emitting organic light-emitting diode where blue emission sources from plasmon-excited upconversion, achieving a high colour rendering index of 86.2 and setting precedent for blue emission in the absence of high-energy polarons or triplets.

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Fig. 1: Mechanism and device schematic.
Fig. 2: Plasmon-enhanced TF upconversion with Kretschmann geometry.
Fig. 3: Driving upconversion with OLED plasmons.
Fig. 4: WOLED with blue upconverted emission.

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Data availability

All data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

J.A.W., B.P.R., E.O.D. and F.N.C. acknowledge support from BioLEC, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under award number DE-SC0019370. We thank N. C. Giebink for helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Jesse A. Wisch, Yiling Q. Li, Tersoo Upaa Jr & Barry P. Rand

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Kelvin A. Green & Amélie C. Lemay

  3. Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Evgeny O. Danilov & Felix N. Castellano

  4. Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Hui Taou Kok

  5. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Seamus S. Lowe

  6. Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Barry P. Rand

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  1. Jesse A. Wisch
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Contributions

J.A.W. conceived the ideas and experiments for this work, conducted the experiments, analysed the data and wrote the paper. K.A.G., A.C.L., Y.Q.L., T.U.J., E.O.D., H.T.K. and S.S.L. conducted the experiments and analysed the data. B.P.R. conceived the ideas and experiments for this work, supervised the project and edited the paper. F.N.C. supervised the project and edited the paper. All authors read and approved the final version of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Barry P. Rand.

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Nature Photonics thanks Tae-Woo Lee and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Sections 1–17, Figs. 1–15 and Tables 1–3.

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Wisch, J.A., Green, K.A., Lemay, A.C. et al. Plasmon-enhanced ultralow-threshold solid-state triplet fusion upconversion. Nat. Photon. 20, 24–30 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01783-1

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