White polymer light-emitting devices for solid-state lighting: materials, devices, and recent progress

White polymer light-emitting devices (WPLEDs) have become a field of immense interest in both scientific and industrial communities. They have unique advantages such as low cost, light weight, ease of device fabrication, and large area manufacturing. Applications of WPLEDs for solid-state lighting are of special interest because about 20% of the generated electricity on the earth is consumed by lighting. To date, incandescent light bulbs (with a typical power efficiency of 12-17 lm W(-1) ) and fluorescent lamps (about 40-70 lm W(-1) ) are the most widely used lighting sources. However, incandescent light bulbs convert 90% of their consumed power into heat while fluorescent lamps contain a small but significant amount of toxic mercury in the tube, which complicates an environmentally friendly disposal. Remarkably, the device performances of WPLEDs have recently been demonstrated to be as efficient as those of fluorescent lamps. Here, we summarize the recent advances in WPLEDs with special attention paid to the design of novel luminescent dopants and device structures. Such advancements minimize the gap (for both efficiency and stability) from other lighting sources such as fluorescent lamps, light-emitting diodes based on inorganic semiconductors, and vacuum-deposited small-molecular devices, thus rendering WPLEDs equally competitive as these counterparts currently in use for illumination purposes.