Highly Efficient Blue Fluorescent OLEDs Based on Upper Level Triplet-Singlet Intersystem Crossing

Purely organic electroluminescent materials, such as thermally activated delayed fluorescent (TADF) and triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) materials, basically harness triplet excitons from the lowest triplet excited state (T-1) to realize high efficiency. Here, a fluorescent material that can convert triplet excitons into singlet excitons from the high-lying excited state (T-2), referred to here as a hot exciton path, is reported. The energy levels of this compound are determined from the sensitization and nanosecond transient absorption spectroscopy measurements, i.e., small splitting energy between S-1 and T-2 and rather large T-2-T-1 energy gap, which are expected to impede the internal conversion (IC) from T-2 to T-1 and facilitate the reverse intersystem crossing from the high-lying triplet state (hRISC). Through sensitizing the T-2 state with ketones, the existence of the hRISC process with an ns-scale delayed lifetime is confirmed. Benefiting from this fast triplet-singlet conversion, the nondoped device based on this hot exciton material reaches a maximum external quantum efficiency exceeding 10%, with a small efficiency roll-off and CIE coordinates of (0.15, 0.13). These results reveal that the hot exciton path is a promising way to exploit high efficient, stable fluorescent emitters, especially for the pure-blue and deep-blue fluorescent organic light-emitting devices.