Theoretical study on the spectroscopic properties and electronic structures of heteroleptic phosphorescent Ir(III) complexes

The geometries, spectroscopic and electronic structures properties of a series of heteroleptic phosphorescent Ir(III) complexes including N981, N982, N983, N984 have been characterized by density functional theory calculations. The excited-state properties of the Ir(III) complexes have been characterized by CIS method. The ground- and excited-state geometries were optimized at the B3LYP/LANL2DZ and CIS/LANL2DZ levels, respectively. By using the time-dependent density functional theory method, the absorption and phosphorescence spectra were calculated based on the optimized groundand excited-state geometries, respectively. The results show that the absorption and emission data agree well with the corresponding experimental results. The calculated results also revealed that the nature of the substituent at the 4-position of the pyridyl moiety can influence the distributions of HOMO and LUMO and their energies. In addition, the charge transport quality has been estimated approximately by the calculated reorganization energy (λ). Our result also indicates that the positions of the substitute groups not only change the transition characters but also affect the charge transfer rate and balance, and complex N982 is a very good charge transfer material for green OLEDs.