Triplet-Triplet Annihilation Enhanced Deep-Blue Organic Light-Emitting Diodes by Naphtho[1,2-d]imidazole-Isomer Derivatives with Spin-Orbit Coupling

The utilization of triplet excitons is of great importance for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) is one of the effective tactics to achieve high efficiency deep-blue organic electroluminescence emitters by converting two triplet excitons into one singlet exciton. Whereas, in addition to the 25% electrogenerated singlet excitons, the proportion of radiative singlet excitons (RSE) produced by the TTA process is usually only 15%; thus the total radiative excitons are 40%. In this study, approximate to 35% of RSE is achieved by the TTA process (total 60%) with two deep-blue emitters based on the isomeric naphthoimidazole (NI) unit and anthracene bridge. As a result, non-doped OLEDs based on the two NI derivatives as emitting layers achieve maximum external quantum efficiencies of 10.9% and 11.2% with an identical deep-blue emission peak of 452 nm, which are the best TTA OLEDs with a Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage chromaticity Y coordinate below 0.15. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the TTA process can be improved owing to the efficient spin-orbit interactions, even though the energy levels of the triplet pairs are higher than the calculated second triplet excited states.

Automated summary

The utilization of triplet excitons is important for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), and triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) is an effective method for achieving high efficiency deep-blue organic emitters. This study demonstrates that by using two deep-blue emitters with efficient spin-orbit interactions, approximately 35% of radiative singlet excitons (RSE) can be achieved through the TTA process, resulting in improved external quantum efficiencies for OLEDs.