Circularly polarized luminescence based on small organic fluorophores

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Highlights

  • •

    Strategies for the design of circularly polarized luminescence (CPL)-active materials.

  • •

    Work mechanisms involved in the design of CPL-active materials.

  • •

    The chiroptical properties the design of CPL-active materials.

Abstract

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has attracted attention as a next-generation light signal because of its carrying more information compared with normal and linearly polarized lights as well as its potential wide application in information fields. Recently, much attention has been paid to small organic molecules-based CPL emitters because of easy synthesis, fine structural modification at molecular level, and tunable wide range emission wavelength. This review highlights the development of small organic molecules-based CPL emitters in the past 5 years (2017–2021). The progress suggests that small organic molecules-based CPL emitters provide a simple and efficient way to generate CPL.

Introduction

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has raised increasing interest owing to its potential application in many areas, such as photonics, information technology, smart sensing, and 3D imaging [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]]. Typically, CPL is achieved by light-emitting devices with a polarizer and a quarter-wave plate, which gives rise to energy loss and complex device structures [7,8]. Consequently, there has been interest in the development of light sources that directly emit [9] or that efficiently convert [10,11] unpolarized light into polarized light. Chiral CPL emitters have recently been demonstrated to provide a simple and efficient way to generate CPL, and a wide range of materials systems, such as polymers [[12], [13], [14], [15]], organic small molecules [[16], [17], [18]], self-assembly systems [[19], [20], [21]], and lanthanide-based coordination complexes [5,[22], [23], [24]] are now being developed to address this requirement.

Although chiral organic molecules display smaller dissymmetry factor (10−4 to 10−2) than that of lanthanide-based coordination complexes (glum values ranging from 0.1 to 1, thanks to their formally f → f Laporte forbidden transitions [5,[24], [25], [26]] due to electric dipole-allowed transitions [27,28]), their tunable photophysical properties, easy processing and integration into optoelectronic devices, and structural variations have made chiral organic molecules valuable candidates for CPL applications [6,[29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39]]. The performance of CPL-active material can be evaluated by the dissymmetry factor, glum, which is quantified as glum = 2 × (IL − IR)/(IL + IR), where IL and IR are the intensities of the left and right circularly polarized emissions, respectively [40]. By definition, −2 ≤ glum ≤ 2, and glum = 0 corresponds to non-CPL. For real application, CPL-active material with large glum value and high luminescence intensity is of vital importance.

This review highlights the progress in the development of organic small molecule–based CPL-active materials. It contains the synthesis of material, the construction of CPL system, and working mechanism. It provides an up-to-date overview of the development of CPL-active materials as well as corresponding technologies, and it also covers the existing challenges.

Section snippets

Design strategies and working mechanisms

A successful CPL emitter should have some merits, including easy preparation, high luminescence intensity, large dissymmetry factor, and color-tunable CPL. There are two strategies reported so far for the design of CPL emitters based on small organic molecules. One is direct model, and the other indirect model (Fig. 1). The former is to conjugate directly an achiral fluorophore with a chiral molecule to produce a chiral fluorophore or fluorophore molecule forms axial chirality via spatial

Direct model

Helicenes are polycyclic aromatic compounds with non-planar screw-shaped skeletons formed by ortho-fused benzene or other aromatic rings. Helicenes can wind in opposite directions by means of the steric hindrance of the terminal rings and have a C2-symmetric axis that is perpendicular to the helical axis. Such structure renders helicenes chiral molecules even though they have no asymmetric carbons or other chiral centers. Because of their interesting structures and chiroptical properties,

Conclusions and outlook

With more and more potential applications of CPL in various fields, the research and development of CPL materials including inorganic materials [[88], [89], [90]], organic materials [[91], [92], [93]], polymer materials [[94], [95], [96]], organic–inorganic hybrid materials [[97], [98], [99]], and supramolecular assemblies [[100], [101], [102]] have reached a flourishing stage. Although different CPL materials have different advantages and disadvantages, from the point of view of practical

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

Financial support was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No 21572241).

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