(209f) High-Efficiency Stretchable Light-Emitting Polymers from Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence

Stretchable light-emitting materials are the key components for realizing skin-like displays and optical biostimulation. All the stretchable emitters reported to date, to the best of our knowledge, have been based on electroluminescent polymers that only harness singlet excitons, limiting their theoretical quantum yield to 25%. Here we present a design concept for imparting stretchability onto electroluminescent polymer system that can harness all the excitons through thermally activated delayed fluorescence, thereby reaching a near-unity theoretical quantum yield. By combining systematic experimental characterization and atomic-level Molecular Dynamics simulations, we show that our design strategy of inserting flexible, linear units into a polymer backbone can substantially increase the mechanical stretchability without affecting the underlying electroluminescent processes¹.

Reference:

1. Liu, W; Zhang, C. et al. High-efficiency stretchable light-emitting polymers from thermally activated delayed fluorescence. Nat. Mater. (2023) doi:10.1038/s41563-023-01529-w.