New Wine in Old Bottles: Fully-Substituted Arylthio Effect Realizes
High-Efficiency Purely Organic Phosphorescence Light-Emitting Diode with
Single and Ultra-Stable Spectra Under 2000 cd m−2
Abstract
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) based on purely organic
room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) materials often encounter issues
of relatively low efficiency and spectral instability. To overcome this
limitation, three (arylthio)benzene derivatives (4S, 5S, and 6S) with
gradually increased RTP component are designed and compared. Theoretical
calculation and photophysical investigation reveal that the
fully-substituted arylthio effect could enhance the aggregation-induced
phosphorescence, enlarge the spin orbital coupling, and reduce the
energy gap between S 1 and T 1 as much
as possible. As a result, 6S can exhibit single spectra in films with a
high phosphorescence efficiency up to 76.7%, and its doped RTP-OLED
furnishes a high maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 15.3% and
ultra-stable spectra with the brightness raised from 30 cd m
-2 to 2000 cd m -2. Furthermore,
serving 6S as the sensitizer, the RTP-sensitized-fluorescent OLEDs based
on fluorescence dopant TBRb and multiple resonance TADF dopant BN3 show
three times improvement in electroluminescence performance, with EQE
values of 11.3% and 25.6%, respectively. These results demonstrate the
feasibility of fully-substituted arylthio effect in designing RTP
materials and could advance the development of high-performance RTP
OLEDs.