Achieving High-Performance Nondoped OLEDs with Extremely Small Efficiency Roll-Off by Combining Aggregation-Induced Emission and Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence

Luminescent materials with thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) can harvest singlet and triplet excitons to afford high electroluminescence (EL) efficiencies for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). However, TADF emitters generally have to be dispersed into host matrices to suppress emission quenching and/or exciton annihilation, and most doped OLEDs of TADF emitters encounter a thorny problem of swift efficiency roll-off as luminance increases. To address this issue, in this study, a new tailor-made luminogen (dibenzothiophene-benzoyl-9,9-dimethyl-9,10-dihydroacridine, DBT-BZ-DMAC) with an unsymmetrical structure is synthesized and investigated by crystallography, theoretical calculation, spectroscopies, etc. It shows aggregation-induced emission, prominent TADF, and interesting mechanoluminescence property. Doped OLEDs of DBT-BZ-DMAC show high peak current and external quantum efficiencies of up to 51.7 cd A(-1) and 17.9%, respectively, but the efficiency roll-off is large at high luminance. High-performance nondoped OLED is also achieved with neat film of DBT-BZ-DMAC, providing excellent maxima EL efficiencies of 43.3 cd A(-1) and 14.2%, negligible current efficiency roll-off of 0.46%, and external quantum efficiency roll-off approaching null from peak values to those at 1000 cd m(-2). To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the most efficient nondoped TADF OLEDs with small efficiency roll-off reported so far.