Stimulating and harnessing circularly polarized luminescence of helically assembled carbonized polymer dots via interfacial dynamics

Stimulating and harnessing circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is not only a sine qua non for fundamentally unveiling chirogenesis in physical chemistry, but also a pivotal prerequisite for implementation of such phenomenon in research fields including chiral optoelectronics and theranostics. Herein, red-emissive carbonized polymer dots (CPDs)-based helical structures were synthesized in this work via biomolecule-tailored organic-inorganic co-assembly strategy. The surface states-related chirality exhibits enhanced circular dichroism (CD) and CPL activities with anisotropic factors as high as g(CD,max) = 5.4 x 10(-3) and g(lum,max) = 1.5 x 10(-2), respectively. The obtained CPL signals can be further manipulated in an excitation-dependent manner, indicating that a synergistic-competition phenomenon exists between configurational chirality and intermolecular energy-transfer dynamics, which is further supported by simulations based on density function theory (DFT). Such tunable CPL behavior triggers revolutionary designs and applications of these chiral CPDs into the realm of chirality-related biological issues and next-generation chiral optoelectronics.