Thermally activated triplet exciton release for highly efficient tri-mode organic afterglow

Abstract

Developing high-efficient afterglow from metal-free organic molecules remains a formidable challenge due to the intrinsically spin-forbidden phosphorescence emission nature of organic afterglow, and only a few examples exhibit afterglow efficiency over 10%. Here, we demonstrate that the organic afterglow can be enhanced dramatically by thermally activated processes to release the excitons on the stabilized triplet state (T₁^*) to the lowest triplet state (T₁) and to the singlet excited state (S₁) for spin-allowed emission. Designed in a twisted donor–acceptor architecture with small singlet-triplet splitting energy and shallow exciton trapping depth, the thermally activated organic afterglow shows an efficiency up to 45%. This afterglow is an extraordinary tri-mode emission at room temperature from the radiative decays of S₁, T₁, and T₁^*. With the highest afterglow efficiency reported so far, the tri-mode afterglow represents an important concept advance in designing high-efficient organic afterglow materials through facilitating thermally activated release of stabilized triplet excitons.

The development of organic afterglow materials that do not contain heavy metals is of interest for biological applications. Here, the authors report on the development of a thermally activated organic molecule with tri-mode afterglow and an afterglow efficiency of up to 45%.