Stepwise Achievement of Circularly Polarized Luminescence on Atomically Precise Silver Clusters

Si Li; Zhi-Ping Yan; Xin-Lei Li; Yu-Jin Kong; Hai-Yang Li; Guang-Gang Gao; You-Xuan Zheng; Shuang-Quan Zang

doi:10.1002/advs.202000738

Stepwise Achievement of Circularly Polarized Luminescence on Atomically Precise Silver Clusters

Adv Sci (Weinh). 2020 Jun 11;7(15):2000738. doi: 10.1002/advs.202000738. eCollection 2020 Aug.

Authors

Si Li¹, Zhi-Ping Yan², Xin-Lei Li¹, Yu-Jin Kong¹, Hai-Yang Li¹, Guang-Gang Gao³, You-Xuan Zheng², Shuang-Quan Zang¹

Affiliations

¹ Green Catalysis Center and College of Chemistry Zhengzhou University Zhengzhou 450001 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 University of Jinan Jinan 250022 China.

Abstract

The weakly coordinated anionic nitrate ligands in a centrosymmetric Ag₂₀ cluster are replaced in a stepwise manner by chiral amino acids and two achiral luminescent sulfonic-group-containing ligands while nearly maintaining the original silver(I) cage structure. This surface engineering enables the atomically precise Ag₂₀ clusters to exhibit the high-efficiency synergetic effects of chirality and fluorescence, producing rare circularly polarized luminescence among the metal clusters with a large dissymmetry factor of (|g_lum|) ≈ 5 × 10^-3. This rational approach using joint functional ligands further opens a new avenue to diverse multifunctional metal clusters for promising applications.

Keywords: chirality; circularly polarized luminescence; postmodification; precise silver clusters; silver (I) clusters.