Recent Advances of Polymer-Based Pure Organic Room Temperature Phosphorescent Materials

Room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) has attracted broad attention due to their long lifetimes, large Stokes shift, and widespread applications. Achieving RTP emission has long been a challenging task under common conditions, for the necessary requirements of promoting intersystem crossing processes and suppressing nonradiative transitions are always tough to meet. Over the past decade, RTP has been obtained through several specific strategies, among which an important method lies in immobilizing phosphors into polymer matrices. Via the effect of steric overcrowding exerted by the polymeric structures, the phosphorescence of the initial phosphors can be promoted significantly. Hence, polymer-based pure organic materials have proved to be one newly emerging subject in the field of RTP materials. In this review article, the progresses of polymer-based pure organic room temperature phosphorescent materials are elaborated from four main approaches, including doped polymer systems, copolymer systems, homopolymer systems, and host-guest complexation systems, whereby the design principles, synthesis methods, possible mechanisms, and applications are summarized and discussed in detail.