A bipolar deep blue-emitting fluorescent material based on imidazole and triphenylamine for efficient non-doped OLEDs

Abstract A bipolar deep blue-emitting fluorescent material, 1-(4-tert-butyl phenyl)-2-[4-(N,N- diphenyl)phenyl]-4,5-diphenyl-1H-imidazole (TPA-PIM) has been designed and synthesized for efficient blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The photophysical, thermal and electrochemical properties of TPA-PIM are investigated. TPA-PIM possesses high thermal stabilities with decomposition temperature of 396 °C and shows a strong deep-blue emission at 407 nm in N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF) solution. Single-carrier devices are fabricated to show that TPA-PIM has good bipolar characteristics. The non-doped fluorescent OLEDs using TPA-PIM as emitter exhibited stable and efficient deep-blue emissions with the CIE coordinates of (0.16, 0.09), the maximum luminance of 1392 cd m−2 and the maximum current efficiency of 2.60 cd A−1.