Dichroic Dyes Mediated Mirrored Full-Color and White Circularly Polarized Luminescence in Natural Cholesteric Liquid Crystals Systems

Abstract

Natural chiral dopants have been widely employed in liquid crystal displays, biomedicine, and chiral optical materials owing to their easy availability of chirality and excellent biocompatibility. However, most natural chiral compounds exist exclusively as single enantiomer, which severely restricts their application scope in circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). Herein, we design and synthesize a class of full-color dichroic dyes capable of modulating the handedness of CPL signals without relying on chiral dopants. In natural chiral dopant-incorporated cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) systems, these dyes with a unique excited-state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) isomeric structure achieve mirror-symmetric full-color and white CPL. This work expands the application of natural chiral compounds in CPL materials and provides a novel, sustainable strategy for high-performance CPL devices and flexible optical displays.