High-Quality Circularly Polarized Organic Afterglow from Nonconjugated Amorphous Chiral Copolymers

Organic materials featuring circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) and/or afterglow emission represent an active research frontier with promising applications in various fields, but the achievement of high-performance CPL organic afterglow (CPOA) remains a huge challenge due to the intrinsic contradictions between the luminescent lifetime/dissymmetry factor (g(lum)) and phosphorescent quantum efficiency (PhQY). Herein, we report a simple and universal approach to design efficient CPOA from amorphous copolymers by incorporating chiral chromophores into a nonconjugated clusterization-triggered emissive polymer with plenty of hydron-bonding interactions, followed by aggregation engineering using water dissolution and evaporation. With this chiral copolymerization and aggregation engineering (CCAE) strategy, high-performance CPOA polymers with PhQYs of up to 6.32%, ultralong lifetimes of over 650 ms, g(lum) values of 3.54 x 10(-3), and the highest figure-of-merit were achieved at room temperature. Given the impressive CPOA performance of these polymers, the applications in multilevel data anticounterfeiting and reversible displays with high stability were demonstrated. These findings through the CCAE strategy to overcome the inherent restraints of CPOA materials lay the foundation for the development of amorphous polymers with superior CPOA, significantly expanding the understanding of CPL and the design of organic afterglow materials.

Automated summary

This study presents a simple and universal approach to design efficient CPL organic afterglow materials by incorporating chiral chromophores into a nonconjugated clusterization-triggered emissive polymer and using aggregation engineering. High-performance CPL organic afterglow polymers with impressive figures-of-merit were achieved at room temperature, demonstrating potential applications in anticounterfeiting and reversible displays.