High Mobility Emissive Excimer Organic Semiconductor Towards Color-Tunable Light-Emitting Transistors

Organic light-emitting transistors (OLETs) are highly integrated and minimized optoelectronic devices with significant potential superiority in smart displays and optical communications. To realize these various applications, it is urgently needed for color-tunable emission in OLETs, but remains a great challenge as a result of the difficulty for designing organic semiconductors simultaneously integrating high carrier mobility, strong solid-state emission, and the ability for potential tunable colors. Herein, a high mobility emissive excimer organic semiconductor, 2,7-di(2-anthryl)-9H-fluorene (2,7-DAF) was reasonably designed by introducing a rotatable carbon-carbon single bond connecting two anthracene groups at the 2,7-sites of fluorene, and the small torsion angles simultaneously guarantee effective conjugation and suppress fluorescence quenching. Indeed, the unique stable dimer arrangement and herringbone packing mode of 2,7-DAF single crystal enables its superior integrated optoelectronic properties with high carrier mobility of 2.16 cm²  ⋅ V^-1  ⋅ s^-1 , and strong excimer emission with absolute photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 47.4 %. Furthermore, the voltage-dependent electrically induced color-tunable emission from orange to blue was also demonstrated for an individual 2,7-DAF single crystal based OLETs for the first time. This work opens the door for a new class of high mobility emissive excimer organic semiconductors, and provides a good platform for the study of color-tunable OLETs.