ABSTRACT
Understanding exciton behavior in organic semiconductor molecules is crucial for the development of organic semiconductor-based excitonic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes and organic solar cells, and the tightly bound electron-hole pair forming an exciton is normally assumed to be localized on an organic semiconducting molecule. We report the observation of long-range coupling of electron-hole pairs in spatially separated electron-donating and electron-accepting molecules across a 10-nanometers-thick spacer layer. We found that the exciton energy can be tuned over 100 megaelectron volts and the fraction of delayed fluorescence can be increased by adjusting the spacer-layer thickness. Furthermore, increasing the spacer-layer thickness produced an organic light-emitting diode with an electroluminescence efficiency nearly eight times higher than that of a device without a spacer layer. Our results demonstrate the first example of a long-range coupled charge-transfer state between electron-donating and electron-accepting molecules in a working device.
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.
