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Aryl-substituted phenanthroimidazoles (PIs) have attracted tremendous attention in the field of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), because they are simple to synthesize and have excellent thermal properties, high photoluminescence quantum yields (PLQYs), and bipolar properties. Herein, a novel blue-green emitting material, ( E)-2-{4′-[2-(anthracen-9-yl)vinyl]-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-yl}-1-phenyl-1 H-phenanthro[9,10- d]imidazole (APE-PPI), containing a t-APE [1-(9-anthryl)-2-phenylethene] core and a PI moiety was designed and synthesized. Owing to the PI skeleton, APE-PPI possesses high thermal stability and a high PLQY, and the compound exhibits bipolar transporting characteristics, which were identified by single-carrier devices. Nondoped blue-green OLEDs with APE-PPI as the emitting layer show emission at λ=508 nm, a full width at half maximum of 82 nm, a maximum brightness of 9042 cd m−2, a maximum current efficiency of 2.14 cd A−1, and Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage (CIE) coordinates of (0.26, 0.55). Furthermore, a white OLED (WOLED) was fabricated by employing APE-PPI as the blue-green emitting layer and 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2- tert-butyl-6-(1,1,7,7-tetramethyljulolidin-4-yl-vinyl)-4 H-pyran (DCJTB) doped in tris-(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminum (Alq3) as the red-green emitting layer. This WOLED exhibited a maximum brightness of 10029 cd m−2, a maximum current efficiency of 16.05 cd A−1, CIE coordinates of (0.47, 0.47), and a color rendering index (CRI) of 85. The high performance of APE-PPI-based devices suggests that the t-APE and PI combination can potentially be used to synthesize efficient electroluminescent materials for WOLEDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three small molecular hole-transporting and emitting materials with naphthalene bridged triphenylamine or carbazole were synthesized. These compounds exhibited high absolute fluorescence quantum yields (70–88%) at the green light region (540–555 nm), suitable highest occupied molecular orbital levels (−5.26 ∼ −5.34 eV) and good hole mobilities (∼10 −4 cm 2 V −1 s −1 ). The hole-only organic light emitting diodes with as-synthesized hole-transporting and emitting materials showed a tune-on voltage and a maximum brightness of 2.6 V and 2010 cd m −2 , respectively. Three stages of voltage-dependent current were observed, which coincide with the characteristic of Ohmic current, Fowler-Nordheim current and space charge limited current. With analysis of above models, overlarge Fowler-Nordheim current and space charge limited current contribute to the low efficiency of the device. All these results indicated that the high hole mobility showed the negative effect on the device efficiency, especially at high operation voltage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]