High-efficiency emissive dendritic phosphorescent iridium (III) complex with thermally activated delayed fluorescence molecules as functional light-harvesting moieties

Abstract

Phosphorescent iridium (III) complexes are considered as competitive candidates for fabricating efficient and stable display and illumination devices by the virtue of excellent exciton utilization. Nevertheless, the high-efficiency phosphorescent emitters available for solution-processed fabrication, are still deemed unsatisfactory for the mainstream industries. In this context, a valid strategy of linking thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) group covalently to phosphorescent iridium (III) complexes was proposed, in which TADF groups function as light-harvesting entities. In this way, the TADF units within the prepared complex TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3, can effectively transfer energy to the phosphor core and thus boost device performances and reduce efficiency roll-off via alleviating the triplet exciton annihilations. As a result, the photoluminescence quantum yield of TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3 blend films can reach to nearly 73 %. Thanks to the peripheral TADF dendrons, flexible TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3 can be employed in fabricating solution-processed phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PhOLEDs) with greenish-blue emission, which achieve external quantum efficiency value over 20 % and maintaining around 16 % at 1000 cd/m2. Overall, this result manifests that the effective utilization of triplet excitons and consequently enhanced device performance of solution-processed PhOLEDs can be accomplished by utilizing TADF molecules as peripheral light-harvesting moieties to construct dendritic phosphorescent emitters.