Sym- and Asym-Expanded Heterohelicene Isomers Featuring Extended Multi-Resonance Skeleton for Narrowband Deep-Blue...

Expanded heterohelicenes composed of alternating linearly and angularly fused multi-resonance (MR) skeletons have gained wide interest owing to their promising narrowband emissions. Herein, a pair of sym- and asym-expanded heterohelicene isomers was obtained by merging boron/oxygen (B/O)-embedded MR triangulene and indolo[3,2,1-jk]carbazole units via one-pot synthesis. Owing to their fully resonating extended helical skeleton, the target heterohelicenes exhibit a significantly narrowed spectra bandwidth while emission red-shifting, thus affording deep-blue narrowband emission with a peak at approximately 460 nm, full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) of only 18 nm, and near-unity photoluminescence quantum yields. In comparison to the symmetrical structure, the asym-expanded heterohelicene displays suppressed aggregation within doped films, thereby showing superior narrowband electroluminescence in devices with CIE coordinates of (0.12, 0.18) and a high external quantum efficiency of up to 25 %, which retains 18.1 % even at a high luminance of 10,000 cd m^-1. Overall, this work provides a novel paradigm for the development of narrowband expanded heterohelicenes.