Benzimidazole based electron-transport hosts for efficient pure blue narrowband OLED device

Two electron-transport host materials are synthesized by linking anthracene with benzimidazole derivatives through a unit of methyl substituted phenyl. The methyl substitution generates a large dihedral angle between the benzimidazole plane and bridging phenyl, keeping the excited state distribution and energy levels of T₁ and S₁ unchanged. The electron-only devices reveal that the two hosts have obviously enhanced electron transport ability than that of Ph-AN-MBP without benzimidazole. As a result, the devices with Ph-AN-BIZ and N1-AN-BIZ as hosts and a blue multiple resonance material of tBuCz-DABNA as emitter exhibit high external quantum efficiency of 10.1 % and 9.1 %, respectively, and low turn-on voltage of 2.7 V, which is better than those of Ph-AN-MBP based device (7.9 %, 3.4 V). And their electroluminescence spectra have a very small full-width at half-maximum of 16.2 nm and pure blue color with CIE coordinates of (0.12, 0.11).