Deuterium deep-blue multi-resonance thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters enable long-lived organic light-emitting diodes
摘要
Deuteration has emerged as an effective isotopic strategy to enhance the intrinsic stability of organic emitters by lowering vibrational zero-point energy and suppressing degradation pathways. However, deuterated multi-resonance thermally activated delayed fluorescence (MR-TADF) materials are still rare and are mainly restricted to green emitters. Herein, a deuterated deep-blue MR-TADF emitter, PAB-d, was synthesized via a one-shot borylation, in which a milder reaction temperature (80 °C) was adopted to mitigate undesired H/D exchange. PAB-d preserves the narrowband deep-blue emission while delivering an enhanced photoluminescence quantum yield (ΦPL = 95%) and a suppressed nonradiative decay rate, with knr reduced to ∼39% of that of the non-deuterated analogue. Vacuum-deposited OLEDs incorporating PAB-d exhibit excellent efficiency (EQEmax = 28.2%) with CIE coordinates of (0.144, 0.073). Notably, the operational stability was substantially improved for PAB-d, affording 1.8-fold longer than that of PAB, consistent with the benefit of a high deuteration degree (∼ 93%) in MR-TADF systems.