Chiral perturbation in D-O-A organic phosphors towards efficient circularly polarized electroluminescence

Chiral organic phosphors with room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) show a great potential in high-performance circularly polarized organic light-emitting diodes (CP-OLEDs). As a proof of concept, herein, we report a pair of chiral RTP enantiomers (S/R)-CP-RTP-D1 with acridine as the donor (D), triazine as the acceptor (A), oxygen as the bridge, and (S/R)-2-methylbutane as the chiral alkyl chain. It is found that the effective chiral perturbation can endow (S/R)-CP-RTP-D1 with mirror symmetric chiroptical properties, while maintaining the characteristic RTP emission. Consequently, the corresponding doped and non-doped CP-OLEDs based on (S/R)-CP-RTP-D1 achieve obvious circularly polarized electroluminescence (CPEL) signals, revealing promising external quantum efficiencies of 14.9% and 13.0% with the dissymmetry factors ∣g_EL∣ of 7.00 × 10⁻⁴ and 9.87 × 10⁻⁴, respectively. These results highlight that chiral perturbation in D-O-A organic phosphors is a reliable strategy towards efficient CPEL.