Effective donor and acceptor modifications of carbazole-benzonitrile thermally activated delayed fluorescence molecules enabling high-performance OLEDs

Carbazole-benzonitrile derivatives (CzBNs) have great potential to enable thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) molecules with both high efficiency and good stability simultaneously. However, the device performances of most CzBN-based organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) still lag behind other types of TADF molecules. In this work, we proposed a design strategy to construct efficient CzBN-TADF molecules through acceptor and donor modifications. The cyano-modified acceptor enables the extension of lowest unoccupied molecular orbital while mostly preserving the overlapped area with the highest occupied molecular orbital. The optimized distributions of frontier molecular orbitals contribute to tiny singlet-triplet energy gaps while maintaining a high radiative decay rate. The incorporation of tert-butyl units in the donor groups further enhances the TADF properties of resulted tPCNBN molecule due to suppressed non-radiative decay and reduced exciton self-quenching. Accordingly, OLEDs based on tPCNBN present the best device performances, such as a maximum external quantum efficiency of 33.1% at 400 cd m-2, which is still as high as 26.3% at a high luminance of 4000 cd m-2, demonstrating relatively low efficiency roll-off. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed design strategy in developing efficient and stable CzBN-TADF materials and devices.