ABSTRACT
Organic compounds that exhibit highly efficient, stable blue emission are required to realize inexpensive organic light-emitting diodes for future displays and lighting applications. Here, we define the design rules for increasing the electroluminescence efficiency of blue-emitting organic molecules that exhibit thermally activated delayed fluorescence. We show that a large delocalization of the highest occupied molecular orbital and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital in these charge-transfer compounds enhances the rate of radiative decay considerably by inducing a large oscillator strength even when there is a small overlap between the two wavefunctions. A compound based on our design principles exhibited a high rate of fluorescence decay and efficient up-conversion of triplet excitons into singlet excited states, leading to both photoluminescence and internal electroluminescence quantum yields of nearly 100%.
ABSTRACT
Fluorescence-based organic light-emitting diodes have continued to attract interest because of their long operational lifetimes, high colour purity of electroluminescence and potential to be manufactured at low cost in next-generation full-colour display and lighting applications. In fluorescent molecules, however, the exciton production efficiency is limited to 25% due to the deactivation of triplet excitons. Here we report fluorescence-based organic light-emitting diodes that realize external quantum efficiencies as high as 13.4-18% for blue, green, yellow and red emission, indicating that the exciton production efficiency reached nearly 100%. The high performance is enabled by utilization of thermally activated delayed fluorescence molecules as assistant dopants that permit efficient transfer of all electrically generated singlet and triplet excitons from the assistant dopants to the fluorescent emitters. Organic light-emitting diodes employing this exciton harvesting process provide freedom for the selection of emitters from a wide variety of conventional fluorescent molecules.
ABSTRACT
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are attractive for next-generation displays and lighting applications because of their potential for high electroluminescence (EL) efficiency, flexibility and low-cost manufacture. Although phosphorescent emitters containing rare metals such as iridium or platinum produce devices with high EL efficiency, these metals are expensive and their blue emission remains unreliable for practical applications. Recently, a new route to high EL efficiency using materials that emit through thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) was demonstrated. However, it is unclear whether devices that emit through TADF, which originates from the contributions of triplet excitons, are reliable. Here we demonstrate highly efficient, stable OLEDs that emit via TADF by controlling the position of the carrier recombination zone, resulting in projected lifetimes comparable to those of tris(2-phenylpyridinato)iridium(III)-based reference OLEDs. Our results indicate that TADF is intrinsically stable under electrical excitation and optimization of the surrounding materials will enhance device reliability.
