An unprecedented spike of the electroluminescence turn-on transience from guest-doped OLEDs with strong electron-donating abilities of host carbazole groups

Abstract

An unreported unprecedented spike of ∼μs line-width, followed by an overshoot, was discovered at the rising edge of transient electroluminescence (TEL) from guest-doped organic light-emitting diodes with strong electron-donating abilities from the host carbazole groups. By changing the device structures and TEL measurement parameters, a series of experimental results demonstrate that this TEL spike is not related to exciton interactions such as singlet–triplet and triplet–triplet annihilations but originated from the radiative recombination of pre-stored electrons with injected holes. Surprisingly, these pre-stored guest electrons do not come from the energy-level traps in the host–guest systems; instead, the guest molecules receive the electrons transferred from the host carbazole groups due to their strong electron-donating abilities. Moreover, the observed spikes show rich and extraordinary temperature dependences. Based on the detailed understanding of the spike formation mechanism, we have proposed the requirements for the occurrence of spike and realized the artificial adjustments of the spike intensity. For instance, the instantaneous luminescent intensity of this spike can reach over 80 times the magnitude of the TEL plateau. Accordingly, this work deepens the physical understanding of this novel spike in TEL and paves the way for fabricating an electro-optic sensor to detect instantaneous weak current signals.