Due to overcoming the limitation of aggregation caused quenching (ACQ) of solid-state emitters, aggregation-induced emission (AIE) organic luminogens have become a promising candidate in aqueous electrochemiluminescence (ECL). However, restricted by the physical nature of fluorescence, current organic AIE luminogen-based ECL (AIECL) faces the bottleneck of low ECL efficiency. Here, we propose to construct de novo aqueous ECL based on aggregation-induced delayed fluorescence (AIDF) luminogens, called AIDF-ECL. Compared with the previous organic AIE luminogens, purely organic AIDF luminogens integrate the superiorities of both AIE and the utilization of dark triplets via thermal-activated spin up-conversion properties, thereby possessing the capability of close-to-unity exciton utilization for ECL. The results show that the ECL characteristics using AIDF luminogens are directly related to their AIDF properties. Compared with an AIECL control sample based on a tetraphenylethylene AIE moiety, the ECL efficiency of our AIDF-ECL model system is improved by 5.4 times, confirming the excellent effectiveness of this innovative strategy.

中文翻译：

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聚集诱导的延迟荧光发光体：用于水性电化学发光的纯有机发光体的创新

由于克服了固态发射器聚集引起的猝灭（ACQ）的限制，聚集诱导发射（AIE）有机发光体已成为水性电化学发光（ECL）的有希望的候选者。然而，受荧光物理性质的限制，目前基于有机AIE发光原的ECL（AIECL）面临着ECL效率低的瓶颈。在这里，我们建议构建基于聚集诱导延迟荧光 (AIDF) 发光原的从头水性 ECL，称为 AIDF-ECL。与之前的有机 AIE 发光体相比，纯有机 AIDF 发光体结合了 AIE 和暗三重态利用的优势，通过热激活自旋上转换特性，从而具有 ECL 接近统一的激子利用能力。结果表明，使用 AIDF 发光体的 ECL 特性与其 AIDF 特性直接相关。与基于四苯基乙烯 AIE 部分的 AIECL 对照样品相比，我们的 AIDF-ECL 模型系统的 ECL 效率提高了 5.4 倍，证实了这一创新策略的卓越有效性。