Published in

National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 46(120), 2023

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310883120

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Evolution of organic phosphor through precision regulation of nonradiative decay

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Development of single-component organic phosphor attracts increasing interest due to its wide applications in optoelectronic technologies. Theoretically, activating efficient intersystem crossing (ISC) via 1 (π, π*) to 3 (π, π*) transitions, rather than 1 (n, π*) → 3 (π, π*) transitions, is an alternative access to purely organic phosphors but remains challenging. Herein, we designed and successfully synthesized the sila-8-membered ring fused biaryl benzoskeleton by transition metal catalysis, which served as a new organic phosphor with efficient 1 (π, π*) to 3 (π, π*) ISC. We first found that such a compound exhibits a record-long phosphorescence lifetime of 6.5 s at low temperature for single-component organic systems. Then, we developed two strategies to tune their decay channels to evolve such nonemissive molecules into bright phosphors with elongated lifetimes at room temperature: 1) Physic-based design, where quantitative analyses of electron–phonon coupling led us to reveal and hinder the major nonradiative channels, thus lighted up room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) with a lifetime of 480 ms at 298 K; 2) chemical geometry-driven molecular engineering, where a geometry-based descriptor ΔΘ T1–S0S0 was developed for rational screening RTP candidates and further improved the RTP lifetime to 794 ms. This study clearly shows the power of interdiscipline among synthetic methodology, physics-based rational design, and computational modeling, which represents a paradigm for the development of an organic emitter.