Highly efficient blue organic light-emitting diodes based on carbene-metal-amides.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32273497.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-15369-8 and PMC identifier 7145843.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Carbene-metal-amides are soluble and thermally stable materials which have recently emerged as emitters in high-performance organic light-emitting diodes. Here we synthesise carbene-metal-amide photoemitters with CF<sub>3</sub>-substituted ligands to show sky-blue to deep-blue photoluminescence from charge-transfer excited states. We demonstrate that the emission colour can be adjusted from blue to yellow and observe that the relative energies of charge transfer and locally excited triplet states influence the performance of the deep-blue emission. High thermal stability and insensitivity to aggregation-induced luminescence quenching allow us to fabricate organic light-emitting diodes in both host-free and host-guest architectures. We report blue devices with a peak external quantum efficiency of 17.3% in a host-free emitting layer and 20.9% in a polar host. Our findings inform the molecular design of the next generation of stable blue carbene-metal-amide emitters.