Organic light-emitting device (OLED) technology has found numerous applications in the development of solid state lighting, flat panel displays and flexible screens. These applications are already commercialized in mobile phones and TV sets. White OLEDs are of especial importance for lighting; they now use multilayer combinations of organic and elementoorganic dyes which emit various colors in the red, green and blue parts of the visible spectrum. At the same time the stability of phosphorescent blue emitters is still a major challenge for OLED applications. In this review we highlight the basic principles and the main mechanisms behind phosphorescent light emission of various classes of photofunctional OLED materials, like organic polymers and oligomers, electron and hole transport molecules, elementoorganic complexes with heavy metal central ions, and clarify connections between the main features of electronic structure and the photo-physical properties of the phosphorescent OLED materials.

A method for calculating the rate constants for internal-conversion (k_IC) and intersystem-crossing (k_ISC) processes within the adiabatic and Franck–Condon (FC) approximations is proposed.

Visualized sensing through fluorescence signals is a powerful method for chemical and physical detection. However, the utilization of fluorescent molecular probes still suffers from lack of precise signal self-calibration in practical use. Here we show that fluorescence and thermally activated delayed fluorescence can be simultaneously produced at the single-molecular level. The thermally activated delayed fluorescence serves as a sensing signal with its wavelength and lifetime both altered correlating to polarity, whereas the fluorescence always remains unchanged as an internal reference. Upon the establishment of a three-dimensional working curve upon the ratiometric wavelength and photoluminescence lifetime vs. polarity, disturbance factors during a relevant sensing process can be largely minimized by such a multiple self-calibration. This strategy was further applied into a precise detection of the microenvironmental polarity variation in complex phospholipid systems, towards providing new insights for convenient and accurate diagnosis of membrane lesions.