Promoting organic room temperature phosphorescence through in situ polymerization

Organic room temperature phosphorescence materials (RTP) have attracted much attention for their wide application in organic light-emitting diodes, anti-counterfeiting, and sensors. In this work, a series of organic luminogens containing carbonyl and aromatics were fixed in a three-dimensional polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) network by in situ polymerization. All organic luminogens-doped in situ PMMA (s-PMMA) columns achieved longer RTP lifetimes than those of doped commercial PMMA (c-PMMA) films, especially, the RTP lifetime of NMP2O in these PMMA matrixes increased from 1.82 ms to 156.34 ms by about 86 times. It is mainly due to the restriction of molecular motions by highly entangled polymer chains and rigid environments to efficiently inhibit the non-radiative transitions. Also, the excellent shielding effect toward oxygen by the in situ polymerization process can avoid possible quenching effects on triplet excited states, beneficial to RTP emission. Thus, it affords an efficient approach to achieving persistent RTP for three-dimensional displaying applications. image