RAPID COMMUNICATION A New Blue-Light Emitting Polymer: Synthesis and Photoinduced Electron Transfer Process YU CHEN, 1 YING LIN, 1 MOHAMED E. EI-KHOULY, 2,3 NAN HE, 1 AIXIA YAN, 4 YING LIU, 1 LIANGZHEN CAI, 1 OSAMU ITO 2 1 Lab for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemistry, East China University of Science and Technology, 130 Meilong Road, Shanghai 200237, People’s Republic of China 2 Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University, CREST, JST, Katahira 2-1-1, Sendai 980-8577, Japan 3 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Education, Tanta University, Egypt 4 State Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Department of Pharmaceutical Engineering, P.O. Box 53, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, 15 BeiSanHuan East Road, Beijing 100029, People’s Republic of China Received 15 August 2007; accepted 22 March 2008 DOI: 10.1002/pola.22769 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). Keywords: conjugated polymers; fullerenes; photophysics; synthesis INTRODUCTION Since the first electroluminescence from poly(phenyle- nevinylene) (PPV) was observed by Burroughes et al. in 1990, 1 the dream of fabricating ultrathin, flexible, and larger-area active displays have stimulated extensive research activities across the world, and consequently the field of polymeric light-emitting diodes (PLED) has invested much effort into the design and synthesis of new polymeric functional materials, and the device optimization. 2,3 In contrast to the red- and green-light emitting polymeric materi- als with high efficiency and good brightness, 4 only a few blue-light emitting polymeric materials 5–7 can meet the requirements of the practical applications. This has been a barrier to develop novel full-color poly- meric displays because these materials can not only serve as blue light sources but also can be used to re- alize all visible emission colors though the internal color-conversion technique based on blue LEDs. Among the large number of blue-light emitting poly- mers 5–7 that have been identified, polyfluorenes (PFs) have emerged as one of the most promising materials owing to their high photoluminescence quantum yields, good charge transport properties, better ther- mal and chemical stability, and the facile functionali- zation at the C-9 position of the fluorene unit which may offer an opportunity to reduce the interchain interactions thereby improving the optoelectronic properties of the resulting polymers. 8 The biggest dis- advantage of PFs lies in their poor spectral stability and low electroluminescence efficiency as a result of keto-defects generated by the oxidation of monoalky- fluorenes. 9 As one of the useful hole transporting materials, triphenylamine (TPA) and its organic and polymeric derivatives have been widely used in OLEDs and PLEDs. 10 It would be desirable to synthe- size polytriphenylamine (PTPA) because in this case it can be directly used to fabricate the corresponding device. For these reasons, we designed and synthe- Correspondence to: Y. Chen (E-mail: chentangyu@yahoo. com); M.E. EI-Khouly (E-mail: mohamedelkhouly@yahoo. com); A. Yan (E-mail: yax630@yahoo.com); and L. Cai (E-mail: cailz@ecust.edu.cn) Journal of Polymer Science: Part A: Polymer Chemistry, Vol. 46, 4249–4253 (2008) V V C 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 4249