“One-stop” polymer circularly polarized luminescence platform: Easy construction of full-color circularly polarized luminescent materials

Abstract

Polymer circularly polarized luminescent (CPL) materials have demonstrated significant application value in the fields of three-dimensional display, optical encryption, and biosensing due to their unique chiral optical properties. However, current polymer CPL materials generally exhibit inadequate precision in emission color tuning. Therefore, it has great significance and wide research interest to construct polymer CPL materials with precise and controllable luminescent colors. In this work, highly reactive pentafluorophenol esters are introduced onto the pendants of helical polyisocyanides, and fluorescent groups with hydroxyl groups can be introduced into the copolymers via a simple transesterification. The successful combination of chiral and fluorescent units by covalent bonding using this method allows rapid preparation of triple primary color (red, green and blue) CPL materials. Due to the special photo-thermal responsive properties of the red fluorescent molecule spiropyran, unique photo-thermal responsive polyisocyanides can be obtained. By mixing the red-emitting polyisocyanide with the green- and blue-emitting polyisocyanide, a variety of multi-color CPL materials can be prepared. This work established a “one-stop” CPL plat-form, which can quickly and easily produce multi-color CPL materials, providing new methods and options for the construction of polymer CPL materials.