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A series of regiochemically varied and core size extension-modulated arene- and fluoroarene-thiophene co-oligomers and the unsubstituted sexithiophene α6T were investigated theoretically to explore their electronic and optical properties. These phenylene-thiophene oligomers show great potential for application in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), organic diode lasers, and organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) because of their feasible tuning of optical and electronic properties by the various structural tunings. Density functional theory (DFT) and the ab initio HF were employed to investigate the geometric and electronic structures of the oligomers in the ground state, and the singles configuration interaction (CIS) methods were used to study the lowest singlet excited state. The lowest excitation energies (Egs), the radiative lifetime τ, and the maximal absorption/emission wavelength of the oligomers were studied within time-dependent DFT (TDDFT). All calculations were performed using the 6-31G(d) basis set. The results show that the HOMOs, LUMOs, energy gaps, ionization potentials (IPs), electron affinities (EAs), and reorganization energies are significantly affected by the various structural tunings in these co-oligomers, which is important for the improvement of the hole and electron injection into OLEDs. Interestingly, the LUMO energy of 1b, 2b, and 3b is lower than that of α6T and 1a, 2a, 3a by about 0.12 ∼ 0.47 eV, indicating that the fluorophenyl-substitution has significantly improved the electron injection properties of the oligomers. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poly(fluorene)-type materials are widely used in polymer-based emitting devices. During operation there appears, however, an additional emission peak at around 2.3 eV, leading to both a color instability and reduced efficiency. The incorporation of the carbazole units has been proven to efficiently suppress the keto defect emission. In this contribution, we apply quantum-chemical techniques to investigate two series of alternating fluorene/carbazole oligomers and copolymers poly[2,7-(N-(2-methyl)-carbazole)-co-alt-2,7-m(9,9-dimethylfluorene)], namely, PFmCz (m = 1,2) and gain a detailed understanding of the influence of carbazole units on the electronic and optical properties of fluorene derivatives. The electronic properties of the neutral molecules, HOMO-LUMO gaps (ΔH-L), in addition to the positive and negative ions, are studied using B3LYP functional. The lowest excitation energies (Egs) and the maximal absorption wavelength λabs of PFmCz (m = 1,2) are studied, employing the time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT). The properties of the two copolymers, such as ΔH-L, Eg, IPs, and EAs were obtained by extrapolating those of the oligomers to the inverse chain length equal to zero (1/n = 0). The outcomes showed that the carbazole unit is a good electron-donating moiety for electronic materials, and the incorporation of carbazole into the polyfluorene (PF) backbone resulted in a broadened energy gap and a blue shift of both the absorption and photoluminescence emission peaks. Most importantly, the HOMO energies of PF1Cz and PF2Cz are both a higher average (0.4 eV) than polyfluorene (PF), which directly results in the decreasing of IPs of about 0.2 eV more than PF, indicating that the carbazole units have significantly improved the hole injection properties of the copolymers. In addition, the energy gap tends to broaden and the absorption and emission peaks are gradually blue-shifted to shorter wavelengths with an increase in the carbazole content in the copolymers. This is due to the interruption of the longer conjugation length of the backbone in the (F1Cz)n series. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 26: 969–979, 2005 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]