Overcome energy loss of exciplex-sensitized fluorescence OLEDs with separating exciton generation and fluorescence emission zone

TADF-sensitizing-fluorescence (TSF) strategy suffered a disturbing energy loss causing by the T1 states of fluorescence dopant (FD) due to its low T1-state energy and forbidden of radiative transition. In this manuscript, we used TCTA/PO-T2T planar heterojunction (PHJ) interface as exciton generation zone and adjacent PO-T2T layer doped with rubrene as fluorescence emission zone, achieved the maximum EQE and CE of 8.3% and 26.1 cd A−1, respectively for rubrene-based device. Our experiments show the necessary PO-T2T thickness doped with rubrene is 15 nm and thicker doping layer over 15 nm would destroy device efficiency. It was further found that the exciplex exciton begin to decay within the time of 4 nm diffusion distance in PO-T2T layer and most of exciplex excitons were restrained in TCTA/PO-T2T heterojunction interface in PHJ device. The about 1.1 eV barrier for hole injection from TCTA to PO-T2T and bad hole-transporting capability of PO-T2T made exciple exciton only generate on this interface. Thus, even if the rubrene doped PO-T2T layer is right after the TCTA layer, FD in PO-T2T layer are well separated to the exciplex excitons in TCTA/PO-T2T interface, overcoming T1 energy loss caused by FD. Our approach provides a beneficial path towards overcome energy loss causing by the T1 states of FD in TSF-OLEDs based on exciplex as TADF sensitizer.