High-Quality Circularly Polarized Organic Afterglow from Nonconjugated Amorphous Chiral Copolymers

Longyan Zhang; Yishan Jin; Yike Wang; Wenjing Li; Zhenli Guo; Jingyu Zhang; Li Yuan; Chao Zheng; Youxuan Zheng; Runfeng Chen

doi:10.1021/acsami.3c10605

High-Quality Circularly Polarized Organic Afterglow from Nonconjugated Amorphous Chiral Copolymers

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2023 Oct 25;15(42):49623-49632. doi: 10.1021/acsami.3c10605. Epub 2023 Oct 10.

Authors

Longyan Zhang¹, Yishan Jin¹, Yike Wang¹, Wenjing Li¹, Zhenli Guo¹, Jingyu Zhang¹, Li Yuan², Chao Zheng¹, Youxuan Zheng², Runfeng Chen^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays (KLOEID) & Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Biosensors, Institute of Advanced Materials (IAM), Nanjing University of Posts & Telecommunications, 9 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing 210023, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China.
³ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, P. R. China.

PMID: 37816127
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.3c10605

Abstract

Organic materials featuring circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) and/or afterglow emission represent an active research frontier with promising applications in various fields, but the achievement of high-performance CPL organic afterglow (CPOA) remains a huge challenge due to the intrinsic contradictions between the luminescent lifetime/dissymmetry factor (g_lum) and phosphorescent quantum efficiency (PhQY). Herein, we report a simple and universal approach to design efficient CPOA from amorphous copolymers by incorporating chiral chromophores into a nonconjugated clusterization-triggered emissive polymer with plenty of hydron-bonding interactions, followed by aggregation engineering using water dissolution and evaporation. With this chiral copolymerization and aggregation engineering (CCAE) strategy, high-performance CPOA polymers with PhQYs of up to 6.32%, ultralong lifetimes of over 650 ms, g_lum values of 3.54 × 10^-3, and the highest figure-of-merit were achieved at room temperature. Given the impressive CPOA performance of these polymers, the applications in multilevel data anticounterfeiting and reversible displays with high stability were demonstrated. These findings through the CCAE strategy to overcome the inherent restraints of CPOA materials lay the foundation for the development of amorphous polymers with superior CPOA, significantly expanding the understanding of CPL and the design of organic afterglow materials.

Keywords: aggregation engineering; chiral copolymerization; chiral organic afterglow; circularly polarized luminescence; figure of merit; organic afterglow.