Spirobifluorene-appended multi-resonance thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitter for efficient narrowband blue OLEDs with suppressed ACQ effect

Abstract

Multi-resonance (MR) thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials with planar rigidity show great potential as emitters in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) due to their high photoluminescence quantum yields and narrowband emission. However, their strong intermolecular interaction trends usually result in redshifted and broadened emission spectra as well as low device efficiencies due to the aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) effect. In this paper, a bulky spirobifluorene unit was appended onto an asymmetric carbazole/diphenylamine-embedded MR skeleton to relieve such trends, thus affording a new MR-TADF blue emitter, BNSF-1. Introducing spirobifluorene significantly relieves the intermolecular interaction trends of MR backbones without affecting their original photophysical properties. The corresponding sensitizer-free OLED devices based on BNSF-1 exhibit narrowband sky-blue electroluminescence peaking at 475 nm with a full width at half-maximum of 25 nm, as well as a maximum external quantum efficiency of 25.9 %. More importantly, BNSF-1 exhibited negligible spectral broadening and ACQ trends as the doping ratio increased. Our work provides a feasible method for constructing doping concentration-insensitive MR-TADF emitters.