Abstract
Afterglow organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with persistent emission after switching off the applied voltage have garnered extensive attention recently, but the available organic afterglow materials for electroexcitation remains rare, along with low device performance. Here, we report a series of high-performance full-color afterglow OLEDs by employing tri-mode afterglow molecule as emitting layer doped with various phosphorescent complexes in a simplified thick-layer OLED architecture. The tri-mode afterglow by transforming the long-lived ultralong phosphorescence to phosphorescence and fluorescence through thermally activated exciton release and reverse intersystem crossing promotes significantly the afterglow efficiency. Indeed, the tri-mode afterglow OLEDs display blue to cyan afterglow with lifetime up to 253 ms and maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 7.4%. After doping of phosphorescent complexes, efficient energy transfer from the tri-mode afterglow host to phosphor dopants results in highly bright and efficient green, yellow and red afterglow OLEDs with the maximum lifetime of 132 ms, total EQE of 24%, and afterglow EQE of 3.6%, representing the highest efficiencies reported so far of afterglow OLEDs. This study opens exciting prospects for the development of high-performance afterglow OLEDs, leveraging unique properties of organic semiconductors with rich triplet excited state behaviors for advanced optoelectronic applications and light-emitting technologies.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22275097 focused on organic afterglow materials and afterglow OLEDs, No. 62374093 focused on host-guest organic after-glow materials and No. 62288102 focused on flexible electronic materials and devices), State Key La-boratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks Shanghai Jiao Tong University (No. 2024GZKF001 focused on organic afterglow luminescent mechanism and applications), Open Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices (No. 2024-skllmd-10 focused on or-ganic afterglow materials and applications), and the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. KYCX221000 and No. KYCX220250 focused on RTP OLEDs and host-guest luminescent materials, respectively). We thank the Orient KOJI Limited for providing technical support for full-time-range lifetime measurements.
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D.Y.C. and R.F.C. conceived the experiments. D.Y.C., R.F.C., W.J.W., and W.H. wrote the manuscript. D.Y.C. prepared the samples and OLED devices, and conducted the analysis and characterization of photophysical properties and device performance. Z.W.X., J.Y.Z., Z.L.G., S.H.L., and Y.L.L. discussed the results and provided the suggestions for the manuscript. C.Z. (Chao Zheng) provided suggestions on sample preparation and characterization. P.Z. and C.Z. (Chang Zeng) were responsible for theoretical calculations of excited-state energies and molecular dynamics modeling, respectively. H.L.Q. used the full-time-range lifetime measurement technique to investigate the long-lived emission proportions. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results.
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Author W.H. is Editor-in-Chief of npj Flexible Electronics. W.H. was not involved in the journal’s review of, or decisions related to, this manuscript. The authors declare no competing financial interests and no patents have been applicated.
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Cui, D., Xu, Z., Zhang, J. et al. High-performance full-color afterglow organic light-emitting diodes with tri-mode emission and efficient energy transfer. npj Flex Electron (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41528-026-00568-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41528-026-00568-y
