Functional Pyrimidinyl Pyrazolate Pt(II) Complexes : Role of Nitrogen Atom in Tuning the Solid-State Stacking and Photophysics

Pt(II) metal complexes are known to exhibit strong solid-state aggregation and are promising for realization of efficient emission in fabrication of organic light emitting diodes (OLED) with nondoped emitter layer. Four pyrimidine–pyrazolate based chelates, together with four isomeric Pt(II) metal complexes, namely: [Pt(pm2z)₂], [Pt(tpm2z)₂], [Pt(pm4z)₂], and [Pt(tpm4z)₂], are isolated and systematically investigated for their structure–property relationships for practical OLED applications. Detailed single molecular and aggregated structures are revealed by photophysical and mechanochromic measurements, grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction, and theoretical approaches. These results suggest that these Pt(II) emitters pack like a deck of playing cards under vacuum deposition, and their emission energy is not only affected by the single molecular designs, but notably influenced by their intermolecular packing interaction, i.e., Pt···Pt separations that are arranged in the order: [Pt(tpm4z)₂] > [Pt(pm4z)₂] > [Pt(tpm2z)₂] > [Pt(pm2z)₂]. Nondoped OLED with emission ranging from green to red are prepared, to which the best performances are recorded for [Pt(tpm2z)₂], giving maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 27.5% at 10³ cd m⁻², maximum luminance of 2.5 × 10⁵ cd m⁻² at 17 V, and with stable CIE_{x, y} of (0.56, 0.44).