Pillar[5]arene-based light-harvesting assemblies with sequential energy-transfer for tunable emission and photocatalysis

Abstract

Sequential energy transfer widely exists in natural light-harvesting systems (LHSs), which greatly benefits the full use of solar energy. In this work, we report an artificial light-harvesting platform derived from pillar (Wang et al., 2021) [5]arene-directed host-guest nanoparticles (WP5⊃G) in aqueous media. The WP5⊃G assembly can serve as a good donor owing to the excellent fluorescence behavior of G in the aggregated state, guaranteeing a two-step FRET from the WP5⊃G to the relay acceptor eosin Y (ESY) and then to the final acceptor Nile red (NiR) to form a WP5⊃G@ESY/NiR system with high efficiency. As a consequence of the flexibility of the system, tunable emission including a highly efficient white-light emission can be realized. The WP5⊃G@ESY/NiR system was further used as a photocatalyst to catalyze dehalogenation reaction in aqueous solution, exhibiting remarkable catalytic activity as compared with the WP5⊃G or ESY/NiR alone.