Flexible, Luminescent Metal-Organic Frameworks Showing Synergistic Solid-Solution Effects on Porosity and Sensitivity

Mixing molecular building blocks in the solid solution manner is a valuable strategy to obtain structures and properties in between the isostructural parent metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). We report nonlinear/synergistic solid-solution effects using highly related yet non-isostructural, phosphorescent Cu-I triazolate frameworks as parent phases. Near the phase boundaries associated with conformational diversity and ligand heterogeneity, the porosity (+150%) and optical O-2 sensitivity (410 times, limit of detection 0.07ppm) can be drastically improved from the best-performing parent MOFs and even exceeds the records hold by precious-metal complexes (3ppm) and C-70 (0.2ppm).