Solution-Processable Chiral Boron Complexes for Circularly Polarized Red Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescent Devices

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) molecules, especially those with thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) properties, have attracted considerable attention due to their great potential for chiroptical organic light emitting diode (OLED) devices. Here we developed a new pair of TADF emitters with CPL based on boron complexes using chiral donor (cD) binaphthalene, acceptor (A) biphenyl boron β-diketonate, and donor (D) biphenylamine in a cD–A–D architecture. With this design, both efficient intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) and chiral ICT for high-performance CPL were established, leading to high dissymmetry factors (|glum|) up to 2.2 × 10–3 in solution and significantly red-shifted emission around 600 nm for red TADF with a quantum yield over 15% in doped films. More impressively, with these chiral TADF emitters, solution-processed red circularly polarized OLEDs (CP-OLEDs) exhibit external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) up to 2.0% and efficient circularly polarized electroluminescence with dissymmetry factors of 2.6 × 10–3, which are among the best performances of the reported solution-processed orange-red and red TADF CP-OLEDs. These results illustrate the great success of the cD–A–D strategy in designing high-performance CPL TADF emitters with axially chiral boron complexes, providing important clues to understand efficient chiral transfer for large |glum| values and high device performance of CP-OLEDs.