Organic light-emitting diodes using open-shell molecule as emitter: the emission from doublet

We fabricate OLEDs using a stable neutral {\pi} radical, BDPA, as the emitter. There is only one electron in the singly occupied molecular orbital (SOMO) of this open-shell molecule. This feature makes the excited state of open-shell molecules be neither singlet nor triplet, but doublet. The key issue of how to harvest the triplet energy in an OLED is thus bypassed, due to the radiative decay of doublet is totally spin allowed. In the BDPA-based OLED, the emission was confirmed to be from the electronic transition from LUMO to SOMO, via the frontier molecular orbital analysis combined with the spectroscopy measurements. The maximum luminance of the OLEDs is 4879 cd/m2 which is comparable to the first reported Fluorescence-, Phosphorecence- and TADF-based OLEDs.