Amplified Circularly Polarized Luminescence Behavior in Chiral Co-assembled Liquid Crystal Polymer Films via the Strategic Manipulation of Chiral Inducers

Abstract

One of the most important factors for the future application of circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials is their high dissymmetry factors ( g em ), and more and more studies are working tirelessly to focus on increasing the g em value. Herein, we chose an achiral liquid crystal polymer (LC-P) and two chiral binaphthyl-based inducers ( R / S -3 and R / S -6) with different substitution positions (3,3′ positions for R / S -3 and 6,6′ positions for R / S -6) to construct chiral co-assemblies and explored their induced amplification CPL behaviors. Interestingly, after the thermal annealing treatment, this kind of chiral co-assembly ( R / S -3) 0.05 –(LC-P) 0.95 can emit a superior CPL signal (| g em | = 0.31 and λ em = 424 nm), which achieves about 13-fold signal amplification in the spin-coated film, compared to ( R / S -6) 0.1 –(LC-P) 0.9 (| g em | = 0.023 and λ em = 424 nm). This is because ( R / S -3) 0.05 –(LC-P) 0.95 could further co-assemble to form a more ordered arrangement LC state and generate regular helix nanofibers than that of ( R / S -6) 0.1 –(LC-P) 0.9 . This work provides an efficient method for synthesizing high-quality CPL-active materials through the strategic manipulation of the structure of chiral binaphthyl-based inducers in chiral co-assembled LCP systems.