Light-Driven Energy Transfer in Luminescent Helical Superstructures Coassembled by Inorganic and Organic Molecules

Abstract

In recent years, controllable circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials with a high luminescence dissymmetry factor (glum) have attracted great interest due to their potential applications, such as optical display, optical data storage, optical encryption, and anticounterfeiting, which has become a popular research topic in the field of functional optoelectronic materials. In this work, by incorporating achiral CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs) and the photochromic molecule, hydroxyl-containing spiropyran (SP–OH), into chiral nematic liquid crystals (N*-LCs) with a regular self-assembled helical superstructure, reversibly phototuning CPL in color and glum values based on the Förster resonance energy-transfer process from CdSe/ZnS QDs to SP–OH is successfully developed. The change of emission intensity and the enhancement of glum value demonstrate the existence of efficient energy transfer, which can be regulated on the basis of reversible photoisomerization process of SP–OH, resulting in various CPL emissions with enhanced glum value up to 1.0. This work can potentially be applied to chiral information storage and coding. Meanwhile, this provides a new method and idea for the preparation of intelligent and efficient CPL materials.