A high-performance dual-functional organic upconversion device with detectivity approaching 1013 Jones and photon-to-photon efficiency over 20%

Organic upconversion devices (UCDs) are a cutting-edge technology and hot topic because of their advantages of low cost and convenience in the important applications of near-infrared (NIR) detection and imaging. However, to realize utilization of triplet excitons (T1), previous UCDs have the drawback of heavily relying on toxic and costly heavy-metal-doped emitters. More importantly, due to poor performance of the detecting unit and/or emitting unit, improving their detectivity (D*) and photon-to-photon conversion efficiency (ηp-p) is still a challenge for real applications. Here, we report a high-performance dual-functional purely organic UCD that has an outstanding D* approaching 1013 Jones and a high ηp-p of 20.1% in the NIR region, which are some of the highest values among those reported for UCDs. The high performance is credited to the excellent D* of the detecting unit, exceeding 1014 Jones, and is also attributed to efficient T1 utilization via a dual reverse intersystem crossing channel and high optical out coupling achieved via a high horizontal dipole ratio in the emitting unit. The high D* and ηp-p enable the UCD to detect 850 nm light at as little as 0.29 μW cm-2 and with a high display contrast of over 70 000 : 1, significantly improving the potential of practical applications of UCDs in NIR detection and imaging. Furthermore, a fast rise time and fall time of 8.9 and 14.8 μs are also achieved. Benefiting from the high performance, consequent applications of low-power pulse-state monitoring and fine-structure bio-imaging are successfully realized with high quality results by using our organic UCDs. These results demonstrate that our design not only eliminates dependence of UCDs on heavy-metal emitters, but also takes their performance and applications to a high level.