Highly efficient thienylquinoline-based phosphorescent iridium(III) complexes for red and white organic light-emitting diodes

Highly efficient 2-(thiophen-2-yl)quinoline-based phosphorescent iridium(III) complexes bearing 2-(3-(trifluoromethyl)-1H-1,2,4-triazol-5-yl)pyridine or picolinic acid as ancillary ligands are designed and synthetised. The variation of ancillary ligands is attempted to finely tune the photophysical properties of these complexes, especially the solution phosphorescent quantum yields (ΦPL), full width at half maximum (FWHM), etc. The picolinic acid-based complex displays the slightly red-shifted dual-peak emission compared to triazolpyridine-based one. The complexes show bright emission with broad FWHM up to 83 nm, and the emissions are in red region with the very high absolute ΦPL up to 0.76 in solution. Moreover, high-performance red and three-color-based white organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with excellent color stability have been fabricated. The maximum external quantum efficiencies of red and white OLEDs can reach 16.2% and 15.1%, respectively. The maximum current efficiency and power efficiency of white OLED are as high as 35.5 cd A−1 and 34.0 lm W−1, respectively. Especially, the designed white OLED exhibits excellent spectral stability under wide operating voltage range, and the 1931 Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage of white OLED only changes from (0.43, 0.42) to (0.44, 0.44), the color rendering index is in a narrow range of 75–77.