Novel liquid crystals with circularly polarized luminescence induced by tartaric core

Abstract

This work not only developed series of novel CPL molecules, but also confirmed that the method of designing liquid crystals with chiral core surrounded by peripheral achiral AIEgens was an effective strategy to construct the CPL materials. Three bis-cyanostilbene derivatives bridging by tartaric spacer (TC-5, TC-8 and TC-12) were prepared in yields of 81%-86%. They exhibited the orderly helical molecular stacking in mesophase and emitted the strong fluorescence at aggregated states. They possessed good CD and CPL properties based on the chiral transfer from tartrate core to peripheral cyanostilbene units. The orderly helical self-assembly in mesophase displayed the better CPL emission than the disorderly aggregation in solid films. The alkyl chains made important influence on CPL properties and TC-8 with octyl chain was the optimized structure for producing the best chiral transfer and the strongest CPL signal.