Phosphorus-containing organic electroluminescent materials

A great deal of attention has been focused on the electroluminescent materials due to their great potentials in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The incorporation of heteroatoms into π-conjugated systems is an effective method to modify the properties of organic electroluminescent materials. Phosphorus atom not only possesses d orbit for σ-π interaction, but also allows chemical modifications in diverse ways, such as oxidation, sulfuration and metal-coordination to fine-tune the properties. The rapid development of phosphorus-containing π-conjugated materials greatly broadens the molecular structure design and the optoelectronic property improvement of organic electroluminescent materials. In this review, various phosphorus-containing π-conjugated materials were summarized and discussed according to the different incorporation modes of the phosphorus atoms, including phosphole, dithienophosphole, phosphalfluorene, and phosphorus substituted polyphenylene vinylene, etc. The progress of phosphorus-containing electroluminescent materials were summarized and their future development was prospected.