Boosting Organic Afterglow Performance via a Two-Component Design Strategy Extracted from Macromolecular Self-Assembly

Dahua Li; Minjian Wu; Xuefeng Chen; Jiahui Liu; Yan Sun; Ju Huang; Yunlong Zou; Xuepu Wang; Daoyong Chen; Kaka Zhang

doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c00861

Boosting Organic Afterglow Performance via a Two-Component Design Strategy Extracted from Macromolecular Self-Assembly

J Phys Chem Lett. 2022 Jun 9;13(22):5030-5039. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c00861. Epub 2022 Jun 2.

Authors

Dahua Li¹, Minjian Wu², Xuefeng Chen², Jiahui Liu², Yan Sun², Ju Huang², Yunlong Zou², Xuepu Wang², Daoyong Chen¹, Kaka Zhang²

Affiliations

¹ The State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers and Department of Macromolecular Science, Fudan University, 2005 Songhu Road, Shanghai 200438, People's Republic of China.
² Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Self-Assembly Chemistry for Organic Functional Molecules, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 345 Lingling Road, Shanghai 200032, People's Republic of China.

PMID: 35652697
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c00861

Abstract

Because intersystem crossing and phosphorescence decay are spin-forbidden in organic systems, it is challenging to obtain high-performance organic afterglow materials. Inspired by two-component design strategy from macromolecular self-assembly, here we report the utilization of synthetic polymers to control the excited state properties of difluoroboron β-diketonate (BF₂bdk) and deuterated BF₂bdk compounds for the fabrication of room-temperature organic afterglow materials. The polymer component can interact with BF₂bdk excited states by dipole-dipole interactions, lower BF₂bdk S₁ levels with insignificant effect on T₁ levels, reduce ΔE_ST, and thus enhance intersystem crossing of BF₂bdk excited states. The polymer component can also suppress intramolecular motion of BF₂bdk triplets and protect BF₂bdk triplets from oxygen quenching. The obtained BF₂bdk-polymer afterglow materials exhibit emission lifetimes up to 2.2 s and high photoluminescence quantum yields under ambient conditions, display excellent processability and flexibility, and can function as efficient donors for excited state energy transfer to construct red afterglow materials.