TY - JOUR
T1 - High-efficiency stretchable light-emitting polymers from thermally activated delayed fluorescence
AU - Liu, Wei
AU - Zhang, Cheng
AU - Alessandri, Riccardo
AU - Diroll, Benjamin T.
AU - Li, Yang
AU - Liang, Heyi
AU - Fan, Xiaochun
AU - Wang, Kai
AU - Cho, Himchan
AU - Liu, Youdi
AU - Dai, Yahao
AU - Su, Qi
AU - Li, Nan
AU - Li, Songsong
AU - Wai, Shinya
AU - Li, Qiang
AU - Shao, Shiyang
AU - Wang, Lixiang
AU - Xu, Jie
AU - Zhang, Xiaohong
AU - Talapin, Dmitri V.
AU - de Pablo, Juan J.
AU - Wang, Sihong
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is supported by the Start-Up Funds from the University of Chicago, National Science Foundation CAREER Award no. 2239618, and the University of Chicago Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, which is funded by the National Science Foundation under award no. DMR-2011854. We acknowledge the Research Computing Center of the University of Chicago for computational resources. We used the Center for Nanoscale Materials, an Office of Science user facility supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. D.V.T. and J.J.d.P. acknowledge support from MICCoM, as part of the Computational Materials Sciences Program funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, under grant DOE/BES 5J-30161-0010A. D.V.T. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under grant no. DMR-2019444. R.A. is supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO Rubicon 019.202EN.028). X.Z. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no. 51821002. We thank X. M. Lin for assisting us with the experiment at Argonne National Laboratory. We thank M. Zhang, X. K. Liu, X. D. Ma, P. J. Pei, C. Arneson and S. R. Forrest for helping with the experiments, and D. F. Yuan and L. P. Yu for discussions about polymer synthesis.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2023/6
Y1 - 2023/6
N2 - Stretchable light-emitting materials are the key components for realizing skin-like displays and optical biostimulation. All the stretchable emitters reported to date, to the best of our knowledge, have been based on electroluminescent polymers that only harness singlet excitons, limiting their theoretical quantum yield to 25%. Here we present a design concept for imparting stretchability onto electroluminescent polymers that can harness all the excitons through thermally activated delayed fluorescence, thereby reaching a near-unity theoretical quantum yield. We show that our design strategy of inserting flexible, linear units into a polymer backbone can substantially increase the mechanical stretchability without affecting the underlying electroluminescent processes. As a result, our synthesized polymer achieves a stretchability of 125%, with an external quantum efficiency of 10%. Furthermore, we demonstrate a fully stretchable organic light-emitting diode, confirming that the proposed stretchable thermally activated delayed fluorescence polymers provide a path towards simultaneously achieving desirable electroluminescent and mechanical characteristics, including high efficiency, brightness, switching speed and stretchability as well as low driving voltage.
AB - Stretchable light-emitting materials are the key components for realizing skin-like displays and optical biostimulation. All the stretchable emitters reported to date, to the best of our knowledge, have been based on electroluminescent polymers that only harness singlet excitons, limiting their theoretical quantum yield to 25%. Here we present a design concept for imparting stretchability onto electroluminescent polymers that can harness all the excitons through thermally activated delayed fluorescence, thereby reaching a near-unity theoretical quantum yield. We show that our design strategy of inserting flexible, linear units into a polymer backbone can substantially increase the mechanical stretchability without affecting the underlying electroluminescent processes. As a result, our synthesized polymer achieves a stretchability of 125%, with an external quantum efficiency of 10%. Furthermore, we demonstrate a fully stretchable organic light-emitting diode, confirming that the proposed stretchable thermally activated delayed fluorescence polymers provide a path towards simultaneously achieving desirable electroluminescent and mechanical characteristics, including high efficiency, brightness, switching speed and stretchability as well as low driving voltage.
UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01576-3
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151624058&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41563-023-01529-w
DO - 10.1038/s41563-023-01529-w
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 37024592
AN - SCOPUS:85151624058
SN - 1476-1122
VL - 22
SP - 737
EP - 745
JO - Nature Materials
JF - Nature Materials
IS - 6
ER -
