Synthesis and Properties of Diarylamino-Substituted Linear and Dendritic Oligoquinolines for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

Synthesis and Properties of Diarylamino-Substituted Linear and Dendritic Oligoquinolines for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes

The coupling reaction between 5-bromo-3-phenylbenzo[c]isoxazole and diphenylamine followed by further condensation with a mono-, di- or ter-acetyl aromatic compound in the presence of diphenyl phosphate at $145^{\circ}C$ gave a novel asymmetric diarylquinolines, oligoquinolines with diphenylamine endgroups, and a first generation quinoline dendrimer in 41-82% isolated yield. The electrochemical and photophysical properties of the oligoquinolines were characterized by cyclic voltammograms (CVs) and spectroscopy. All the quinolines emit bright sky blue light due to charge transfer from quinoline group to diphenly amine with very high quantum efficiency (> 90%). Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) were fabricated using these quinolines as emitting materials. Among different device architectures explored, OLEDs with a structure of ITO/PEDOT (40 nm)/TAPC (15 nm)/D-A quinoline (40 nm)/TPBI (30 nm)/LiF (1 nm)/Al using TAPC as an electron blocking layer and TPBI as a hole blocking layer gave the best performance. A high external quantum efficiency in the range of 1.2-2.3% were achieved in all the quinolines with the best performance in BBQA(5). Our results indicate diarylamino-substituted oligoquinoline and dendrimer are promising materials for OLEDs applications.