Interfacial Passivation Enormously Enhances Electroluminescence of Triphenylphosphine Cu<sub>4</sub> I<sub>4</sub> Cube.

Li, Ying; Zhang, Xianfa; Man, Yi; Xu, Shiwei; Zhang, Jing; Zhang, Guangming; Chen, Shuo; Duan, Chunbo et al. · Adv Mater · 2023

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Defect is one of the key factors limiting optoelectronic performances of organic-inorganic hybrid systems. Although high-efficiency bidentate ligands based electroluminescent (EL) clusters reported, until present, only few EL clusters based on monodentate ligands are realized since their structural instability induces more surface/interface defects. Herein, this bottleneck is first overcome in virtue of interfacial passivation by electron transporting layers (ETL). Through using TmPyPB with meta-linked pyridines as ETL, photoluminescent (PL) and EL quantum efficiencies of the simplest monophosphine Cu<sub>4</sub> I<sub>4</sub> cube [TPP]<sub>4</sub> Cu<sub>4</sub> I<sub>4</sub> are greatly improved by ≈2 and 23 folds, respectively, as well as ≈200 folds increased luminance, corresponding to a huge leap from nearly unlighted (<20 nits) to highly bright (>3000 nits). The passivation effect of TmPyPB on surface defects of cluster layer is embodied as preventing interfacial charge trapping and suppressing exciton nonradiation.