Lock-and-Key Exciplexes for Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence

• Main Authors: Voll, Constantin-Chri Alexander (Author), Markopoulos, Georgios (Author), Wu, Tony C (Author), Welborn, Matthew Gregory (Author), Engelhart, Jens (Author), Rochat, Sebastien (Author), Han, Ggoch Ddeul (Ggoch Ddeul Grace) (Author), Sazama, Graham T. (Author), Lin, Ting-An (Author), Van Voorhis, Troy (Author), Baldo, Marc A (Author), Swager, Timothy M (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Georg Thieme Verlag KG, 2020-12-08T15:42:58Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We combine synthetic supramolecular chemistry and materials science to develop novel exciplexes for thermally activated delayed fluorescence. Our approach starts from a bowl-shaped acceptor molecule for which we synthesize tailor-made donors that bind in a lock-and-key fashion. The donor design is guided by extensive density functional theory calculations of three independent donor families. The investigation of a large number of custom-synthesized donors allows us to derive empirical relationships for the prediction of the exciplex emission color. Incorporated within organic light-emitting devices, the lock-and-key exciplexes yield external quantum efficiencies of up to 5.4%, with potentially tunable emission color across the blue and green visible spectrum.