Design of Efficient Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Materials for Pure Blue Organic Light Emitting Diodes

Efficient thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) has been characterized for a carbazole/sulfone derivative in both solutions and doped films. A pure blue organic light emitting diode (OLED) based on this compound demonstrates a very high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of nearly 10% at low current density. Because TADF only occurs in a bipolar system where donor and acceptor centered 3ππ* states are close to or higher than the triplet intramolecular charge transfer (3CT) state, control of the π-conjugation length of both donor and acceptor is considered to be as important as breaking the π-conjugation between them in blue TADF material design.