Dipole orientation analysis without optical simulation: application to thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters doped in host matrix

The dipole orientation of guest emitters doped into host matrices is usually investigated by angular dependent photoluminescence (PL) measurements, which acquire an out-of-plane PL radiation pattern of the guest-host thin films. The PL radiation patterns generated by these methods are typically analysed by optical simulations, which require expertise to perform and interpret in the simulation. In this paper, we developed a method to calculate an orientational order parameter S without the use of full optical simulations. The PL radiation pattern showed a peak intensity (I (sp)) in the emission direction tilted by 40°–60° from the normal of the thin film surface plane, indicating an inherent dipole orientation of the emitter. Thus, we directly correlated I (sp) with S. The S − I (sp) relation was found to depend on the film thickness (d) and refractive indices of the substrate (n (sub)) and the organic thin film (n (org)). Hence, S can be simply calculated with information of I (sp), d, n (sub), and n (org). We applied our method to thermally activated delayed fluorescence materials, which are known to be highly efficient electroluminescence emitters. We evaluated S and found that the error of this method, compared with an optical simulation, was less than 0.05.