Narrowing the Electroluminescence Spectra of Multiresonance Emitters for High-Performance Blue OLEDs by a Peripheral Decoration Strategy

Developing organic thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters with high efficiency and narrowband emissions is crucial and challenging for high-quality organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Here, three multiresonance TADF emitters DPACzBN1, DPACzBN2, and DPACzBN3 are designed via a peripheral decoration strategy and synthesized through a lithium intermediate cascade borylation reaction (15% yield for DPACzBN1) or a more efficient lithium-free direct borylation reaction (45% yield for DPACzBN2 and 75% yield for DPACzBN3). All the emitters exhibit a similar blue emission with small full-width at half maximum (fwhm) values as low as 20 nm in toluene solutions. The introduction of the diphenylamino moiety into the parent molecule DPACzBN1 can not only maintain the high photoluminescence quantum yields over 90% but also narrow the bandwidth and enhance the rate constant of the reverse intersystem crossing process, as well as suppress the spectral broadening in devices. Benefiting from the excellent TADF properties and good inhibition of spectral broadening, TADF OLEDs based on DPACzBN3 achieve the highest maximum external quantum efficiency of 27.7% and the smallest fwhm of 24 nm among the three emitters.