Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Derivatives toward Ideal Electron-Transporting Materials for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

Dongdong Zhang; Lian Duan

doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.9b00526

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Derivatives toward Ideal Electron-Transporting Materials for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

J Phys Chem Lett. 2019 May 16;10(10):2528-2537. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.9b00526. Epub 2019 May 6.

Authors

Dongdong Zhang^{1

2}, Lian Duan^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Key Lab of Organic Optoelectronics and Molecular Engineering of Ministry of Education, Department of Chemistry , Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084 , China.
² Center for Flexible Electronics Technology , Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084 , P.R. China.

PMID: 31038961
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.9b00526

Abstract

One seemingly fundamental issue for electron-transporting materials (ETMs) in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is the mutual exclusion of a high electron-transporting mobility ( μ_e) and a large molecular triplet energy for good exciton confinement. Very recently, a trade-off was realized by adopting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) derivatives as bipolar ETMs. Though the intrinsic low triplet energy of PAH moieties, good exciton confinement abilities are realized by manipulating the peripheral groups, integrating large μ_e values and long-term stabilities simultaneously. The resulting state-of-the-art OLED performances manifest the bright future of such ETMs. This Perspective summarizes the theoretical and experimental work relating to the relationship between the molecular structure of PAH-type ETMs and their electronic properties, focusing on charge transfer and exciton confinement abilities; the Perspective concludes by providing a vision of future developments in this field.