Improving performance of thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitter by extending its LUMO distribution

Abstract

An optimized compound 9-(9,9-dimethylacridin-10(9H)-yl)-6H-benzo[c]ch-romen-6-one (MAB) was designed and synthesized based on our previously reported TADF emitter 6-(9,9-dimethylacridin-10(9H)-yl)-3-methyl-1H-isochromen-1-one (MAC) to further improve the performance of thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters. With the additional phenyl in coumarin-contained plane, MAB possesses an extended distribution of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMO), and thus realizes reduced electron exchange between the frontier molecular orbitals and a stretched molecular dipole moment compared with MAC. MAB based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) exhibits a remarkable maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 21.7%, which is much better than the maximum EQE of MAC-based OLED with a value of 12.8%. Our work proves that extending the distribution of LUMO is a simple but effective method to improve the efficiency of TADF emitter.