Thermally activated triplet exciton release for highly efficient tri-mode organic afterglow

Abstract Developing high-efficient afterglow from metal-free organic molecules remains a formidable challenge due to the intrinsically spin-forbidden phosphorescence emission nature of organic afterglow, and only a few examples exhibit afterglow efficiency over 10%. Here, we demonstrate that the organic afterglow can be enhanced dramatically by thermally activated processes to release the excitons on the stabilized triplet state (T 1 * ) to the lowest triplet state (T 1 ) and to the singlet excited state (S 1 ) for spin-allowed emission. Designed in a twisted donor–acceptor architecture with small singlet-triplet splitting energy and shallow exciton trapping depth, the thermally activated organic afterglow shows an efficiency up to 45%. This afterglow is an extraordinary tri-mode emission at room temperature from the radiative decays of S 1 , T 1 , and T 1 * . With the highest afterglow efficiency reported so far, the tri-mode afterglow represents an important concept advance in designing high-efficient organic afterglow materials through facilitating thermally activated release of stabilized triplet excitons.