A novel metal-free amorphous room-temperature phosphorescent polymer without conjugation

Room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) has attracted much attention due to its potential applications in the fields of biological imaging, chemical sensors and so forth. Particularly, amorphous metal-free RTP materials show special advantages of low cost and good processability. In addition, non-conjugated polymers have seldom been reported as phosphorescent materials. In this work, a novel non-conjugated amorphous metal-free copolymer composed of brominated olefins and acrylamide was prepared in a facile way, which could engender blue-purple RTP emission. Polymers with different kinds of brominated olefins and different ratios of two monomers have been investigated with the purpose of researching the composition/property relationship that may affect the RTP properties. This unique phenomenon could be due to the clustering of carbonyl and amino units caused molecular interaction, and the heavy-atom effect enhanced intersystem crossing. Meantime, the hydrogen bonding in the system enhanced the conformation rigidification to reduce the non-radiative decay. This work provided a delicate way to construct non-conjugated metal-free RTP materials and supplied a new insight into the development of RTP materials.