Benzene-cored AIEgens for deep-blue OLEDs: High performance without hole-transporting layers, and unexpected excellent host for orange emission as a side-effect

Great efforts have been devoted to explore efficient fluorescent materials, especially deep-blue luminogens, for organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). In this paper, according to the design idea of creating luminogens with the characteristic of aggregation induced emission (AIE), four new benzene-cored luminogens with very simple structure have been intelligently designed, in which, without an additional hole-transporting layer (such as NPB), 3TPA-CN exhibited deep-blue emission and high performance in a simple nondoped LED device with a current efficiency (CE) of 5.21 cd A^-1, external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 3.89%, and CIE coordinates of (0.15, 0.14). Excitingly, as a wonderful side-effect, 3TPA-CN can serve as an excellent host for orange emissive phosphorescent OLEDs (PhOLEDs), with a maximum current and power efficiency of 57.4 cd A^-1 and 52.0 lm W^-1, respectively, and a corresponding maximum EQE of 18.2%, higher than that of CBP (15.7%), one popular host for orange PhOLEDs, under the same conditions, thus broadening the utilization of AIEgens as host in PhOLEDs.