Organic white-light emitting materials

• Luminescent organic materials find significant attention owing to their applications in display and lighting.
• For distinctive identification of any set of visible colors, human eyes require white-light (WL) illumination.
• As fluorescent organic molecules rarely demonstrate such emission, special design strategies are being adopted.
• From single molecules to polymeric and self-assembled systems etc.; are being studied for WL generation.
• This review brings forward the current status in the design and development of organic WL emissive materials.

Full-color emissive organic materials have attracted significant attention in recent years as key components in display and lighting devices based on OLEDs. An ideal white-light emitter demands simultaneous emission of red, green and blue with nearly similar distribution of intensities covering the entire region of visible spectra. However, the design of such white-light emitters is not straightforward. Mixing several emitters is seldom successful owing to the negative effects of intermolecular interactions and energy transfer processes. Nonetheless, these fundamental questions have been addressed in recent times by several research groups of vastly different expertise leading to a considerable progress in the field of organic white-light emitters. The designs cover a large area of the chemistry ranging from frustrated energy transfer to simple protonation or from designed self-assembly to simple mixing of materials. In this review, the concepts and rational approaches underlying the design of white-light emissive organic materials are described.

Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide