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An efficient solid-solution crystalline organic light-emitting diode with deep-blue emission

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 264–272 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Crystalline organic semiconductors are potentially attractive media for advanced organic solid-state light-emitting devices due to their advantageous highly oriented transition dipole moments and high mobility of charge carriers, which should in principle lead to efficient light emission; however, crystalline organic semiconductor-based organic light-emitting diodes (C-OLEDs) have until now struggled with poor device performance. Here we report a method to create high-performance C-OLEDs by using organic solid-solution thin films of deep-blue fluorescent materials. Our C-OLED exhibits a strong photon output capacity and has an external quantum efficiency of up to 6.5% with Commission Internationale de L’Eclairage (CIE) colour coordinates of around (0.15, 0.07). The driving voltage (4.0 V@1,000 cd m–2), power efficiency (3.9 lm W–1@1,000 cd m–2) and series-resistance joule-heat loss ratio (11.1%@1,000 cd m–2) outperform deep-blue amorphous OLEDs (CIEy ≤ 0.08), making it an attractive approach for next-generation OLED technologies.

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Fig. 1: Device structure and performances of solid-solution C-OLED.
Fig. 2: Fabrication and characterization of crystalline OSS thin films.
Fig. 3: Photophysical characteristics and carrier mobility.
Fig. 4: Comparisons of solid-solution C-OLED with amorphous OLEDs.

Data availability

All of the data are available in the main text or Supplementary Information. Source Data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2017YFA0204704 to D.H.Y). We acknowledge Jilin Yuanhe Electronic Material Company for support in preparing materials, Y. Wang for support in calculating TDM, D. Ma and D. Yang for support in measuring angle-dependent photoluminescence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China

    Peifu Sun, Dan Liu, Feng Zhu & Donghang Yan

  2. School of Applied Chemistry and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Peifu Sun, Dan Liu, Feng Zhu & Donghang Yan

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  1. Peifu Sun
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Contributions

F.Z. and D.H.Y. initiated and designed the research. P.F.S. performed the growth of the crystalline thin films, the fabrication and characterization of the OLEDs. D.L. contributed to the crystal structure characterization of 2FPPICz and OSS crystalline thin films. F.Z. and D.H.Y. supervised the project. All authors discussed the results, prepared and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Feng Zhu.

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Nature Photonics thanks Wenping Hu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Sun, P., Liu, D., Zhu, F. et al. An efficient solid-solution crystalline organic light-emitting diode with deep-blue emission. Nat. Photon. 17, 264–272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01138-0

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