Exploring the generation and transfer of chirality at different hierarchical levels has always been a significant research subject. The present contribution reports our success in inducing and regulating the helical chirality of achiral macromolecules (racemic polyacetylene) by using a chiral helical macromolecule (chiral polylactide); helical chirality is sufficiently transferred between two types of helical polymer chains. Hydrogen bonds are demonstrated to play a crucial role in the chirality transfer process. More interestingly, the induced helical chirality can be further transferred to additionally added achiral fluorophore molecules, thereby leading to the emission of full-color and white circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). The present study opens up an unprecedented two-step chirality transfer process to realize both the generation of helical chirality in achiral polymers and full-color CPL emissions in achiral fluorescence compounds.
Realizing chiral crystals from achiral compounds is an important but challenging issue. Here, a kebab-structured chiral supra-crystallization complex is constructed in accomplishing hierarchical chiral crystallization of achiral fluorescent compound (1,8-naphthalic anhydride, NA) employing synthetic chiral macromolecules (polylactide, PLA) as a template. Chirality transfer efficiently takes place from PLA to NA crystal during the co-crystallization process, endowing the initial achiral NA crystal with intense optical activity. More importantly, the obtained chiral supra-crystals show remarkable circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) properties, with the highest luminescence dissymmetric factor up to 5 × 10 −2 . Moreover, handedness-tunable and nonreciprocal CPL emissions are further realized in one single sample by simply flipping and rotating the supra-crystallization composite film, following a polarization mechanism. The work presents the first polymer-based hierarchical chiral supra-crystal with switchable CPL emissions and provides a simple and universal strategy for constructing nonreciprocal CPL materials.
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