Ionic Liquid‐Based Stimuli‐Responsive Functional Materials

Ionic liquids (ILs) have many attractive properties. For example, their physical and chemical properties can be tuned by a judicious design of the cations and anions, making them ideal candidates for designable building blocks of stimuli-responsive materials. Numerous IL-based stimuli-responsive materials have been developed by chemical modification (covalent, coordination, or ionic functionalization) or physical blending of ILs with other functional materials. The flexible tunability of ILs provides a great opportunity to achieve the desired physicochemical properties for task-specific applications, such as sensing, display, gas capture, and so on. This review aims to address the recent advances in IL-based stimuli-responsive materials, which are categorized by the type of external stimuli, including gas-responsive, organic solvent-responsive, ion-responsive, pH-responsive, thermo-responsive, photo-responsive, and electro-responsive materials.