The hydrogen/deuterium isotope effect of the host material on the lifetime of organic light-emitting diodes.

The hydrogen/deuterium primary kinetic isotope effect provides useful information about the degradation mechanism of OLED host materials. Thus, replacement of labile C-H bonds in the host with C-D bonds increases the device lifetime by a factor of five without loss of efficiency, and replacement with C-C bonds by a factor of 22.5.