Observation of Nonradiative Deactivation Behavior from Singlet and Triplet States of Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Emitters in Solution

Excited states of emissive organic molecules undergo various kinds of quenching phenomena such as vibration-coupled quenching depending on their environmental conditions. Because bright singlet excitons in purely organic molecules exhibiting thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) can access dark triplet excited states, photogenerated singlet excitons can decay nonradiatively through both singlet and triplet excited states. Here, we investigated nonradiative decay behavior, including internal and external exciton quenching processes, of various types of TADF materials in solution. Under air-saturated conditions, both the lowest singlet and triplet excited states of almost all of the TADF materials showed oxygen quenching. We considered the effect of oxygen quenching for both spin states to develop a method for determination of the triplet contribution to the total photoluminescence quantum yield from the transient photoluminescence profiles. Furthermore, we observed a clear energy gap law for the internal nonradiative processes.