Chiral Spiro-Axis Induced Blue Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Material for Efficient Circularly Polarized OLEDs with Low Efficiency Roll-Off

A spiro-axis skeleton not only introduces circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) into thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) molecules but also enhances the intramolecular through space charge transfer (TSCT) process. Spiral distributed phenoxazine and 2-(trifluoromethyl)-9H-thioxanthen-9-one-10,10-dioxide act as donor and acceptor units, respectively. The resulting TADF enantiomers, (rac)-OSFSO, display emission maxima at 470 nm, small singlet-triplet energy gap (Delta E-ST) of 0.022 eV and high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 81.2 % in co-doped film. The circularly polarized OLEDs (CP-OLEDs) based on (R)-OSFSO and (S)-OSFSO display obvious circularly polarized electroluminescence (CPEL) signals with dissymmetry factor up to 3.0x10(-3) and maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE(max)) of 20.0 %. Moreover, the devices show remarkably low efficiency roll-off with an EQE of 19.3 % at 1000 cd m(-2) (roll-off ca. 3.5 %), which are among the top results of CP-OLEDs.

Automated summary

This study achieved efficient circularly polarized OLEDs by introducing a spiral-axis skeleton and TADF molecules, demonstrating high efficiency and low efficiency roll-off.