An Ultraviolet Fluorophore with Narrowed Emission via Coplanar Molecular Strategy

Narrowband emitting fluorophores exhibit immense potentials for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with high color purity. However, it's still hard to simultaneously realize short-wavelength ultraviolet (UV) or near ultraviolet emission (NUV) while maintaining a narrowed full width at half maximum (FWHM) value, and rare work focus on such challenging pursuit. Herein, an ingenious synthetic method was devised to achieve emitters with coplanar structure. 11-(4,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-triazin-2-yl)indolo[3,2,1-jk]carbazole (ICZ-TAZ) was designed to realize narrowed UV emission both in photoluminescence (PL) and electroluminescence (EL) which benefited from the suppression of vibronic coupling. UV/NUV OLEDs based on ICZ-TAZ achieve external quantum efficiency (EQE) maximums of 3.26 % peaks @ 388 nm and 4.02 % peaks @ 406 nm with small FWHM of 32 nm and 46 nm, respectively, corresponding with reduced efficiency roll-off at luminance of 100 cd m-2 .