A new class of light-emitting molecules, built around copper and carbon-based carbene groups, could finally make deep-blue OLEDs both efficient and long-lasting. Today’s OLED screens—used in smartphones, TVs, and virtual-reality headsets—struggle to produce a stable, pure deep-blue light. The materials that come closest either fade quickly or rely on scarce, expensive metals like iridium and platinum. This project brings together chemists from the University of Manchester and Kyoto University to design organometallic compounds that combine an ultra-short excited-state lifetime, near-perfect luminescence efficiency, and a narrow emission profile—properties that together yield high colour purity and durability. By using abundant copper instead of precious metals, the materials also address sustainability and cost for mass-market devices. If successful, the work could eliminate a key bottleneck in display and lighting technology, enabling energy-saving OLEDs that last longer and consume less power. That would help reduce electronic waste and lower the carbon footprint of billions of screens, supporting net-zero emissions targets. The research is applied and materials-focused, with a clear path to commercial use in consumer electronics and lighting.
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Advanced and sustainable photonic materials are impossible to imagine without new chemical discoveries. The key merit of the proposed research project: “Development of Advanced Carbene-Metal-based Multiresonant Luminophores” - is to realize superior light-emitting materials via cutting-edge chemical discovery. This research proposal aims to establish a new collaboration between the two world-leading research teams in the UK (Dr Romanov, University of Manchester) and Japan (Prof Takuji Hatakeyama, University of Kyoto) to build on their current research success, unite their efforts and progress the discovery/development of the advanced luminescent materials. Organometallic multi-resonant (MR) thermally activated delayed fluorescent (TADF) materials with unprecedented electronic properties, i.e., ultra short excited state lifetime, unity luminescence quantum yields, narrow luminescence profile (high colour purity) will be developed. We believe that these properties, coupled with the superior stability of the material, are of vital importance to solve one of the most acute problems and challenges in organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) technology – the absence of the highly efficient and long-lasting material to realize a deep-blue OLED. This will be achieved by capitalizing on the research expertise of the UK and Japan teams to design new multi-resonant (MR) carbene-metal-amides (CMA-MR) and carbene-metal-acetylides (CMA-MR). The proposed research targets are unknown in the literature necessitating new international collaboration to rapidly advance the research field and create long-sought luminescent materials for lighting and display (TV, smartphones, touchpads, augmented/virtual reality) applications. Capitalizing on the UK and Japan teams’ experience in materials design, we will develop sustainable light-emitting materials based on abundant elements, such as copper, to minimize the use of scarce elements (gold, platinum, iridium) while maintaining energy efficiency and promising stability characteristics. Sustainability and environmental aspects are particularly important, considering that the proposed materials could be the key components for the mass market of future display and lighting devices. Our sustainable materials, coupled with the energy-saving OLED technology, will avoid the creation of future problems for the next generations. Therefore, the proposed advanced luminophore materials will contribute to reaching the ambitious target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and comply with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) 2030 Agenda.
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