A family
of starburst conjugated molecules composed of a pyrene
core and diphenylamine end-cappers with various oligofluorene bridge
lengths, named as P1F, P2F, and P3F, were designed, synthesized, and characterized. The resulting materials
exhibited good photoluminescence (PL) properties and excellent thermal
stability with high degradation temperatures (T
d, the temperature with 5% weight loss) over 400 °C. A
combination of the thermal, photophysical, electrochemical, fluorescence
transients, electroluminescence (EL), amplified spontaneous emission
(ASE), and lasing measurements were carried out to reveal further
the influence of the diphenylamine moieties as electron-donating end-cappers
on their optoelectronic properties. It is interesting to find that
the PL spectra are significantly blue-shifted for P2F (∼11–15 nm) and P3F (∼14–22
nm) relative to those of P1F in both dilute solutions
and films with an extension in the conjugation length of the oligofluorenes,
which is quite different from the common phenomenon of red-shifted
PL spectra for the general starburst molecules with increasing the
conjugation length. It is supposed that the introduction of strong
electron-donating diphenylamine units helps to construct donor-π-acceptor
structures that enable intramolecular excitation energy transfer transition
from the diphenylamine donor to the pyrene acceptor. The diphenylamine
units also play a key role in raising the highest occupied molecular
orbital (HOMO) energy levels of the molecules, which is beneficial
for improving the charge injection and transport properties. Consequently,
efficient EL properties with rather low turn-on voltages of 2.7–3.0
V among nondoped blue OLEDs have been achieved. Moreover, stabilized
EL and ASE with high net gain coefficients (around 73.6–81.9
cm–1) and low waveguide loss (about 2.10–4.90
cm–1) have been demonstrated. One dimensional distributed
feedback (1D DFB) lasers demonstrated a low lasing threshold of 2.1
kW cm–2 (25 nJ pulse–1) at 475
nm for P2F. All the results confirm that the novel molecular
design strategy on constructing diphenylamine-capped pyrene-centered
starburst molecules can obviously improve the EL performance by fine
modulating the HOMO energy levels, but did not largely sacrifice their
optical gain properties. The high gain and low loss with excellent
thermal and optical stability have rendered these donor-π-acceptor
starburst conjugated molecules rather attractive as robust gain media
for organic lasers.