Constructing Soluble Anthracene-Based Blue Emitters Free of Electrically Inert Alkyl Chains for Efficient Evaporation- and Solution-Based OLEDs.

Anthracene derivatives are one of the most promising blue emitters employed in organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) because of their electrochemical and thermal stabilities. However, their high crystallinity owing to their large π-planar structures severely impedes the progress in the development of solution-based systems. In this work, we developed two types of highly soluble multifunctional anthracene derivatives terminated with ortho-biphenyl and triphenylamine moieties and showed high solubility in general organic solvents such as toluene, tetrahydrofuran, and cyclohexanone at high concentrations (>10 mg mL-1 ), and showed blue emission with a peak wavelength of ∼465 nm and a high photoluminescence quantum yield that ranges up to 81 %. Notably, these emitters are suitable for fabricating both evaporation- and solution-based systems. The evaporation-based system OLED achieved a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 5.4 %. While the solution-processed system realized 4.8 %, exhibiting the best performance among the anthracene-based solution-processed OLEDs so far.