Organic materials that exhibit thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) are an attractive class of functional materials that have witnessed a booming development in recent years. Since Adachi et al. reported high-performance TADF-OLED devices in 2012, there have been many reports regarding the design and synthesis of new TADF luminogens, which have various molecular structures and are used for different applications. In this review, we summarize and discuss the latest progress concerning this rapidly developing research field, in which the majority of the reported TADF systems are discussed, along with their derived structure-property relationships, TADF mechanisms and applications. We hope that such a review provides a clear outlook of these novel functional materials for a broad range of scientists within different disciplinary areas and attracts more researchers to devote themselves to this interesting research field.

Mechanofluorochromic materials, which are dependent on changes in physical molecular packing modes, have attracted considerable interest over the past ten years. In this review, recent progress in the area of pure organic mechanofluorochromism is summarized, and majority of the reported organic mechanofluorochromic systems are discussed, along with their derived structure-property relationships. The existence of a structural relationship between aggregation-induced emission compounds and mechanofluorochromism is recognized based on our recent results, which considered aggregation-induced emission compounds as a well of mechanofluorochromic materials. The established structure-property relationship will guide researchers in identifying and synthesizing more mechanofluorochromic materials.

Although persistent room‐temperature phosphorescence (RTP) emission has been observed for a few pure crystalline organic molecules, there is no consistent mechanism and no universal design strategy for organic persistent RTP (pRTP) materials. A new mechanism for pRTP is presented, based on combining the advantages of different excited‐state configurations in coupled intermolecular units, which may be applicable to a wide range of organic molecules. By following this mechanism, we have developed a successful design strategy to obtain bright pRTP by utilizing a heavy halogen atom to further increase the intersystem crossing rate of the coupled units. RTP with a remarkably long lifetime of 0.28 s and a very high quantum efficiency of 5 % was thus obtained under ambient conditions. This strategy represents an important step in the understanding of organic pRTP emission.

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Compounds displaying delayed fluorescence (DF), from severe concentration quenching, have limited applications as nondoped organic light-emitting diodes and material sciences. As a nondoped fluorescent emitter, aggregation-induced emission (AIE) materials show high emission efficiency in their aggregated states. Reported herein is an AIE-active, DF compound in which the molecular interaction is modulated, thereby promoting triplet harvesting in the solid state with a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 93.3%, which is the highest quantum yield, to the best of our knowledge, for long-lifetime emitters. Simultaneously, the compound with asymmetric molecular structure exhibited strong mechanoluminescence (ML) without pretreatment in the solid state, thus exploiting a design and synthetic strategy to integrate the features of DF, AIE, and ML into one compound.

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A novel white-light-emitting organic molecule, which consists of carbazolyl- and phenothiazinyl-substituted benzophenone (OPC) and exhibits aggregation-induced emission-delayed fluorescence (AIE-DF) and mechanofluorochromic properties was synthesized. The CIE color coordinates of OPC were directly measured with a non-doped powder, which presented white-emission coordinates (0.33, 0.33) at 244 K to 252 K and (0.35, 0.35) at 298 K. The asymmetric donor-acceptor-donor' (D-A-D') type of OPC exhibits an accurate inherited relationship from dicarbazolyl-substituted benzophenone (O2C, D-A-D) and diphenothiazinyl-substituted benzophenone (O2P, D'-A-D'). By purposefully selecting the two parent molecules, that is, O2C (blue) and O2P (yellow), the white-light emission of OPC can be achieved in a single molecule. This finding provides a feasible molecular strategy to design new AIE-DF white-light-emitting organic molecules.