Axially Chiral TADF-Active Enantiomers Designed for Efficient Blue Circularly Polarized Electroluminescence.

The use of a chiral, emitting skeleton for axially chiral enantiomers showing activity in thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) with circularly polarized electroluminescence (CPEL) is proposed. A pair of chiral stable enantiomers, (-)-(S)-Cz-Ax-CN and (+)-(R)-Cz-Ax-CN, was designed and synthesized. The enantiomers, both exhibiting intramolecular π-conjugated charge transfer (CT) and spatial CT, show TADF activities with a small singlet-triplet energy difference (ΔEST ) of 0.029 eV and mirror-image circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) activities with large glum values. Notably, CP-OLEDs based on the enantiomers feature blue electroluminescence centered at 468 nm with external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) of 12.5 and 12.7 %, and also show intense CPEL with gEL values of -1.2×10-2 and +1.4×10-2 , respectively. These are the first CP-OLEDs based on TADF-active enantiomers with efficient blue CPEL.