Highly Emissive Perylene Diimide-Based Metallacages and Their Host-Guest Chemistry for Information Encryption

Yali Hou; Zeyuan Zhang; Shuai Lu; Jun Yuan; Qiangyu Zhu; Wei-Peng Chen; Sanliang Ling; Xiaopeng Li; Yan-Zhen Zheng; Kelong Zhu; Mingming Zhang

doi:10.1021/jacs.0c09904

Highly Emissive Perylene Diimide-Based Metallacages and Their Host-Guest Chemistry for Information Encryption

J Am Chem Soc. 2020 Nov 4;142(44):18763-18768. doi: 10.1021/jacs.0c09904. Epub 2020 Oct 21.

Authors

Yali Hou¹, Zeyuan Zhang¹, Shuai Lu^{2

3}, Jun Yuan⁴, Qiangyu Zhu⁵, Wei-Peng Chen⁶, Sanliang Ling⁷, Xiaopeng Li², Yan-Zhen Zheng⁶, Kelong Zhu⁴, Mingming Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Shaanxi International Research Center for Soft Matter, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, P. R. China.
² College of Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518055, P. R. China.
³ College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, P. R. China.
⁴ School of Chemistry, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, P. R. China.
⁵ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, P. R. China.
⁶ Frontier Institute of Science and Technology (FIST), Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, P. R. China.
⁷ Advanced Materials Research Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom.

PMID: 33085462
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.0c09904

Abstract

Here we report two highly emissive perylene diimide (PDI)-based metallacages and explore their complexation with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as pyrene, triphenylene, and perylene. The fluorescence quantum yields of metallacages exceed 90% and their binding constants with perylene can reach as high as 2.41 × 10⁴ M^-1 in acetonitrile. These features enable further tuning of the emission of the host-guest complexes to obtain white-light emission based on the complementary orange emission of the metallacages and the blue emission of perylene. Moreover, owing to the huge differences of their quantum yields in solution and in the solid state, the host-guest complexes are successfully employed for information encryption. This study offers a general approach for the construction of emissive metallacages and explores their application for information encryption.