High-Efficiency Emissive Dendritic Phosphorescent Iridium (Iii) Complex with Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Molecules as Functional Light-Harvesting Moieties

Phosphorescent iridium (III) complexes are considered as competitive candidates for fabricating efficient and stable display and illumination devices by the virtue of excellent exciton utilization. Nevertheless, the high-efficiency phosphorescent emitters available for solution-processed fabrication, are still deemed unsatisfactory for the mainstream industries. In this context, a valid strategy of linking thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) group covalently to phosphorescent iridium (III) complexes was proposed, in which TADF groups function as light-harvesting entities. In this way, the TADF units within the prepared complex TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3, can effectively transfer energy to the phosphor core and thus boost device performances and reduce efficiency roll-off via alleviating the triplet exciton annihilations. As a result, the photoluminescence quantum yield of TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3 blend films can reach to nearly 73 %. Thanks to the peripheral TADF dendrons, flexible TriTADF-Ir(dFppy)3 can be employed in fabricating solution-processed phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PhOLEDs) with greenish-blue emission, which achieve external quantum efficiency value over 20 % and maintaining around 16 % at 1000 cd/m2. Overall, this result manifests that the effective utilization of triplet excitons and consequently enhanced device performance of solution-processed PhOLEDs can be accomplished by utilizing TADF molecules as peripheral light-harvesting moieties to construct dendritic phosphorescent emitters.