Highly efficient blue and all-phosphorescent white polymer light-emitting devices based on polyfluorene host

We report efficient blue electrophosphorescent polymer light emitting devices with polyfluorene (PFO) as the host and iridium bis[2-(4,6-difluorophenyl)-pyridinato-N,C-2] picolinate (FIrpic) as the dopant. Despite the low-lying triplet energy level of the polyfluorene polymer host, phosphorescent quenching can be suppressed by using poly(N-vinylcarbazole) (PVK) as anode buffer layer, resulting in a high luminous efficiency of 26.4 cd A(-1), which is one of the best results in the literature based on conjugated polymer reported to date. The reduced phosphorescent quenching is found to be associated with the exciton formation and charge carrier recombination within the PVK layer and the PVK/PFO interface due to the accumulation of holes. As compared with the devices based on non-conjugated host polymer PVK, the devices based on PFO showed a lower turn-on voltage (3.6 V vs. 4.4 V) and higher power efficiency (17 lmW(-1) vs. 8.3 lmW(-1)) due to the higher mobility of PFO. When doubly doped with a newly synthesized yellow-emitting metallophosphor, white polymer light-emitting devices with superior device performance (a peak device efficiency of 40.9 cd A(-1), a CIE coordinates of (0.32, 0.48), and a power efficiency of 31.4 lmW(-1)) was achieved. These findings can broaden our selection in polymer hosts for highly efficient phosphorescent blue emitting devices and can find potential applications in full color displays and solid-state lighting applications in the future. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.