Accelerating ambient soft-landing for the separation of aggregation-induced emission luminogens with unique properties

Abstract

The separating and obtaining of AIEgens with narrow-sized distribution is significant for aggregation-induced emission (AIE) examinations and applications, so far no effective pathway has been reported for separation of AIEgens with weak interactions. Here, with the aid of deflecting electric fields and accelerating electric fields, we fabricated an accelerating ambient soft-landing (AASL) as a soft separation method for accelerating and separating charged particles. By AASL, AIEgens of Cu nanoclusters (NCs) were sprayed and converted into charged particles of vapor-phase by electrospray, thereby to be selected by entering defecting electric field, then accelerated in the following accelerating electric field for the separation based on sizes, and finally landed on the receptor surface for collections. Without breaking the weak interactions between AIEgens of CuNCs, this separation can maintain the original fluorescence (FL) properties and sizes, which have been confirmed by transmission electron microscope (TEM), FL microscope, and atomic force microscope (AFM). In addition, the accumulation of uniform-sized AIEgens on the surface showed the positive correlation between AIEgens size and the landing distance, which helped to make a better collection of different size of AIEgens. This work provides a promising pathway to obtain particular monodispersed AIEgens with uniform sizes, which would be significant for further examinations and applications of AIE materials.