The development of high‐performance solution‐processed organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs) remains a challenge. An effective solution, highlighted in this work, is to use highly efficient thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) dendrimers as emitters. Here, the design, synthesis, density functional theory (DFT) modeling, and photophysics of three triazine‐based dendrimers, tBuCz2pTRZ, tBuCz2mTRZ, and tBuCz2m2pTRZ, is reported, which resolve the conflicting requirements of achieving simultaneously a small ΔEST and a large oscillator strength by incorporating both meta‐ and para‐connected donor dendrons about a central triazine acceptor. The solution‐processed OLED containing a host‐free emitting layer exhibits an excellent maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax) of 28.7%, a current efficiency of 98.8 cd A−1, and a power efficiency of 91.3 lm W−1. The device emits with an electroluminescence maximum, λEL, of 540 nm and Commission International de l'Éclairage (CIE) color coordinates of (0.37, 0.57). This represents the most efficient host‐free solution‐processed OLED reported to date. Further optimization directed at improving the charge balance within the device results in an emissive layer containing 30 wt% OXD‐7, which leads to an OLED with the similar EQEmax of 28.4% but showing a significantly improved efficiency rolloff where the EQE remains high at 22.7% at a luminance of 500 cd m−2.

It is well known that in organic solids the collision of two excitons can give rise to delayed fluorescence (DF). Revived interest in this topic is stimulated by the current endeavor towards the development of efficient organic optoelectronic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and solar cells, or sensitizers used in photodynamic therapy. In such devices, triplet excitations are ubiquitously present but their annihilations can be either detrimental, e.g., giving rise to a roll-off of intensity in an OLED, or mandatory, e.g., if the sensitizer relies on up-conversion of long-lived low-energy triplet excitations. Since the employed materials are usually noncrystalline, optical excitations migrate via incoherent hopping. Here, we employ kinetic Monte Carlo simulations (KMC) to study the complex interplay of triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) and quenching of the triplet excitations by impurities in a single-component system featuring a Gaussian energy landscape and variable system parameters such as the length of the hopping sites, i.e., a conjugated oligomer, the morphology of the system, the degree of disorder (σ ), the concentration of triplet excitations, and temperature. We also explore the effect of polaronic contributions to the hopping rates. A key conclusion is that the DF features a maximum at a temperature that scales with σ/k B T. This is related to disorder-induced filamentary currents and thus locally enhanced triplet densities. We predict that a maximum for the TTA process near room temperature or above requires typically a disorder parameter of at least 70 meV.

The potential of dendrimers exhibiting thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) as emitters in solution-processed organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) has to date not yet been realized. This in part is due to a poor understanding of the structure-property relationship in dendrimers where reports of detailed photophysical characterization and mechanism studies are lacking. In this report, using absorption and solvatochromic photoluminescence studies in solution, the origin and character of the lowest excited electronic states in dendrimers with multiple dendritic electron-donating moieties connected to a central electron-withdrawing core via a para-or a meta-phenylene bridge is probed. Characterization of host-free OLEDs reveals the superiority of meta-linked dendrimers as compared to the already reported para-analogue. Comparative temperature-dependent time-resolved solid-state photoluminescence measurements and quantum chemical studies explore the effect of the substitution mode on the TADF properties and the reverse intersystem crossing (RISC) mechanism, respectively. For TADF dendrimers with similarly small ∆E ST , it is observed that RISC can be enhanced by the regiochemistry of the donor dendrons due to control of the reorganization energies, which is a heretofore unexploited strategy that is distinct from the involvement of intermediate triplet states through a nonadiabatic (vibronic) coupling with the lowest singlet charge transfer state.