Materials That Emit Rainbows

“Most MCL materials generate two colors by switching between a stable state and one metastable state. To realize multi-color MCL, more metastable states are necessary,” explain Professors Youhei Takeda and Satoshi Minakata at the Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering of Osaka University. To create these states, the chemist team led by Takeda and Minakata designed a new molecule by applying a conformationally-switchable phenothiazine (PTZ) as the donor.

Fig.2. Image of the change in luminescence colors of MCL materials

“By making the use of a promising and unique acceptor, dibenzophenazine (DBPHZ), which we previously developed, we made a PTZ-DBPHZ-PTZ triad,” said Takeda. “In this structure, the PTZ moiety could take two distinct conformers, which therefore in principle creates in total four metastable states as a whole molecule.”

“For red, both of PTZ units take an equatorial-equatorial conformer, for orange, PTZ had an equatorial-axial conformer, and for yellow, PTZ had an axial-axial conformer.”

Most OLEDs devices with high energy conversion efficiencies depend on expensive precious metals. TADF light emitting devices, on the other hand, can achieve equal or better efficiency at much lower cost, which is why they have gained popularity for the design of displays in daily electronics like smart phones.

In collaboration with the physicists team at Durham University, the United Kingdom, led by Dr Data and Professor Monkman, they successfully made highly efficient OLED devices by applying the newly developed MCL-TADF molecule as an emissive material. Incorporating the PTZ-DBPHZ-PTZ triad into a light emitting device resulted in an efficiency three times higher than the theoretical maximum of conventional fluorescent materials.

Takeda says that, “Our molecule could become a basis for efficient light-emitting devices and pressure- and temperature-responsive sensors in the future.”

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Citation: Thermally activated delayed fluorescent phenothiazine–dibenzo[a,j]phenazine–phenothiazine triads exhibiting tricolor-changing mechanochromic luminescence  Journal: Chemical Science
Authors：Masato Okazaki, Youhei Takeda, Przemyslaw Data, Piotr Pander, Heather Higginbotham, Andrew P. Monkman, and Satoshi Minakata
DOI: 10.1039/C6SC04863C
Funded by: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Prize Foundation